One Single Computer Glitch Could Cost Tens of $Billions of Losses, Showing How Frail Technology Has Become

This past Friday morning brought headlines such as "Largest IT Outage in History!" and "Just Like Y2K Except this Time it is Real!" Hundred of millions, if not billions, of people and businesses around the world were affected, from airlines to FedEx and other delivery companies to financial institutions to hotel reservations and personal PC users. The culprit was reported as a Microsoft Windows update to a software program that runs on many Windows computers, from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Microsoft has reported that the glitch affected 8.5 million devices. Since the problem is still ongoing as I write this on Sunday, there is no way to know what the cost is to the global economy because of this glitch. Estimates at this point are claiming it will top 1 $billion in losses. However, I can assure you that those costs will well exceed this estimate, and will easily be in the tens of $billions, just from the loss of online ecommerce sales alone, not to mention every other industry that was affected where sales are not conducted online. I have run my own ecommerce store for over 20 years, and I have a pretty good feel for how sales go each day, based on day of the week, current sales we are running, etc. Yesterday, (Saturday 7/20/24) we had our lowest day in sales for many years, and I would estimate that we lost about 50% of our sales yesterday, due to this problem that obviously prevented many of our customers from ordering online. Globally, there were $5.8 trillion in online sales in 2023, and the forecast for 2024 is $6.3 trillion in sales. $6.3 trillion in online sales for one year is about $16.5 billion in sales every single day. Let's be conservative and estimate that about 30% of ecommerce sales were lost in just one day, yesterday. That would be about $5 billion in lost revenue, and that is just for one day, and only online sales, not sales lost in the airlines industry, hotel industry, freight delivery industry, etc. This loss could easily be in the tens of $billions, if not more, just for ONE single computer glitch, and we will experience the economic ripples of this for the rest of the year.