in our Spotlight on Business Report Travelers and others are still feeling the effects of the Microsoft system crash that happened last Friday causing disruptions everywhere from airports to Banks the breakdown was the result of a software update on Microsoft systems from the US cyber security firm crowd strike now Microsoft is offering a free tool to help fix the faulty update that impacted millions of users and crowd strike is warning of a potential hacking threat as users and companies work to fix the issue I'm joined Now by Mark Guthner from the Rutgers business school to discuss the lingering impact of the outage and what's being done to prevent another [Music] one Mark thanks so much for coming on can you just help us understand um why we saw this massive Global crash last week what happened there okay well the um well first of all thank you for for having me on um this is um a situation where efficient is sort of clashing with um with stability so um what we're seeing in the technology world is everything becoming more and more centralized and so what that does is it creates a single point of failure and in this case if you think about uh crowd strike I think they have about 250 of the S&P 500 stocks uh dependent upon their platform so if they have a problem on their platform 250 of the largest companies have a problem and um and so there's a very small probability that this happens but when it does happen uh it's a catastrophe so what do these failures indicate about um our vulnerabilities because they like you said we are all kind of working off of the same systems yeah so um the systems need to um build some kind of redundancy um and that's sort of because to make systems more and more efficient you centralize you you put everything in one spot and now um uh you know if you're going to create redundancy you're essentially going to have the same thing happening uh someplace else and so a lot of um you know Financial firms might have a transaction take place and then they have a duplicate of that transaction taking place um on another server somewhere and that's how they create um uh redundancy um and and and they don't make mistakes when uh transactions are recorded and uh and and processed so this is a little bit tougher and um so now you're gonna we're gonna have to step back maybe be a little bit less efficient um and companies are going to have to be much more careful or these these large companies that everybody's so dependent upon about how they do their updates and so you know one of the things that that happened with this update is they pushed it out and then all all of a sudden all their customers got updated at the same time and what companies are going to have to do is update in a peace meal fashion so you think about if they were to update let's say 1% of their customers okay that worked let's do another up one 1% it looks like it's working we can roll it out um more broadly but in just a little bit of time that we have left I'm just going to ask you as we've seen uh it's been days since the crash what have been the industries that have been the most impacted and how do they get their systems back up and running okay what I what I have been seeing is the airlines have been having the biggest problems and airports some airports are are kind of uh empty because that controls planes going in and out and and they uh they they and if there's a problem there that you know that costs lives um less so uh even my bank uh went down for a while but they were to able to get uh up and back running again we're fortunate in the um Financial Services industry that there was no real economic issue or events going on that would get give people angst if they couldn't uh uh transact or hedge be that you know individuals or uh you know hedge funds or any kind of institutional investors so we kind of dodged a bullet on that in on that front yeah so a lot to think about in terms of how companies move forward you raise some really interesting points there Mark Guthner associate professor in economics and finance at the Rutgers business school thank you so much okay thank you [Music]