By Cain O’Mahoney
The CrowdStrike fiasco which caused chaos to transport, health services and banks across the globe is a graphic example of capitalism’s over-reliance on digital technology. It is a product of the neo-liberal capitalist model of ‘just in time’ production to maximise profits, that has no ‘just in case’ back-up.
We are, rightly, continually warned about the threat from cyber criminals, but actually the major breakdowns and scandals of the moment are the result of dodgy software, and the scandals just keep coming: CrowdStrike, Post Office Horizon, Oracle at Birmingham City Council, Swanwick Air Traffic Control, West Midlands Pension Fund, Babylon Healthcare, etc, etc.
It is not without irony that the CrowdStrike update was meant to increase cyber security across the Microsoft platform, but it achieved more chaos than criminal hackers probably could have.
And every software glitch has its human casualties. The Post Office Horizon scandal saw people’s lives ruined, leading to suicides and wrongful imprisonments. The Swanwick ATC outage in 2023 saw 700,000 passengers stranded worldwide on an August Bank Holiday.
The Oracle IT system at Birmingham City Council, which was only meant to cost £20mn to install, resulted in wages and bills not being paid, with teachers even reporting bailiffs turning up at their school because suppliers had not been paid. Trying to put that right saw costs rocket to £110mn, and help tip the authority into special measures, leading to massive service and job cuts.
The ongoing West Midlands Pension Fund scandal has seen around 2,000 former public sector workers face delays of up to six months to receive their first payments, leaving many effectively destitute or burning up their savings. A friend of ours was supposed to receive her local government pension on the day she moved house, but has received nothing for five months and is seriously under threat of becoming homeless. Babylon Healthcare, meanwhile, fleeced over £22mn from the NHS and left a trail of financial havoc, before its eventual collapse.
Companies in a rush to get lucrative profits
So why are the big tech software companies so spectacularly failing? Because the tech companies are in a rush to get that lucrative contract signed, with no independent checks or balances or peer reviews of their product…let alone any legal regulation.
But if cowboy builders who defy building regulations and endanger lives, can get prosecuted, why should ‘cowboy’ software builders have no checks on them? When you drill down into what the actual software fault was, it is often laughable, were it not so serious.
Look at the National Air Traffic Services (NAS) outage at their Swanwick ATC last year. In the air traffic management sector, locations selected to plot an aircraft’s flightpath are called ‘waypoints’ and each waypoint is given a code. The waypoint code for Deauville in northern France is DVL. Unfortunately, no one in the industry had bothered to check that Devil’s Lake in North Dakota, USA, also has the same waypoint code, DVL.
So when a French passenger aircraft flying from the US, whose early flightpath included Devil’s Lake (DVL), entered UK airspace and were directed by Swanwick’s software package, called ‘FPRSA-R ‘, to head for Deauville (DVL), when it had already apparently been to ‘DVL’ several hours earlier, the computer’s head exploded.
Only seconds to break down, causing days of chaos
As the subsequent inquiry explained, “The FPRSA-R has now identified a flight whose exit point from UK airspace, referring back to the original flight plan, is considerably earlier than its entry point. Recognising this as being not credible, a critical exception error was generated, and the primary FPRSA-R system, as it is designed to do, disconnected itself from NAS and placed itself into maintenance mode to prevent the transfer of apparently corrupt flight data to the air traffic controllers” (Independent Review of NATS (En Route) plc’s Flight Planning System Failure on 28 August 2023 – Interim Report, Civil Aviation Authority, 14.03.24).
Swanwick’s secondary back up FPRSA-R system immediately kicked in, but then it, too, shut itself down for exactly the same reasons. All this took place in twenty seconds, yet it caused days of flight chaos. And all because no one had checked waypoint codes when designing the package. Next time you board an aircraft, remember your life is in the hands of these people.
Then there were the charlatans at Babylon Healthcare who promised a hi-tech AI system for health services. Yet their ‘AI’ was nothing of the league of the ‘neural networks’ being developed in Silicon Valley. One former employee described their crude tool as: “…decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet” (Sunday Times, 29 October 2023). Wow. Really hi-tech!
And, again, there was the West Midlands Pension Fund scandal. The software package they brought in was not fit for purpose. The Pension Fund manages the pensions of 350,000 people in the West Midlands from more than 800 public sector organisations. The new IT system is to blame for the delays. As an anonymous insider told BBC, “From what I witnessed, the new software seemed to be chosen without thorough scrutiny of its suitability. This system is usually used by smaller pension funds, not one of this size” (BBC Midlands TV, December 18, 2023).
So how did we get here? It is the bosses’ drive to off-load human labour and maximise profits. Or in the case of government ministers, to cut real face-to-face services in the name of so-called ‘effeciences’, but actually to help them deliver tax cuts. Listen to the glee in this report from over a decade ago, on the the digitalisation of government services by the David Cameron government:
“ For some government services, the average cost of a digital transaction is almost 20 times lower than the cost of a telephone transaction, about 30 times lower than the cost of postal transaction and about 50 times lower than a face-to-face transaction” ( Cabinet Office report – Digital Efficiency Report, November 6, 2012).
Many in society are digitally excluded
There is no mention of all the civil servants who were subsequently made redundant, or the fact that many of those who most desperately need to use those services – the long term sick, the impoverished unemployed, the elderly – are more likely to be amongst the digitally excluded in society, but now face barrier upon barrier of push-button call centres and interrogations by computer.
Back to Swanwick, and we can see why the privatised sector loves digitalisation. The FPRSA-R system (when it works!) can process 800 flight plans per hour. Processing flight plans manually (based on current reduced staffing levels displaced by the FPRSA-R system) , can only achieve 60 flight plans per hour.
Incidentally however, when the FPRSA-R software went down and Swanwick had to go manual, the initial ‘DVL problem’ between Swanwick ATC and the French aircraft was quickly resolved. Why? Because a human air traffic controller spoke to a human pilot, so rational and common sense could prevail. Software packages are like clockwork toy cars – they go great, until they hit an obstruction, and then just stop.
All this is being allowed by capitalism because of the eye-watering profits to be made. The average profit margin for a software company is a staggering 83 per cent. CrowdStrike’s profits for the last financial quarter of this year were $3.4bn. Oracle, as we clear up the mess in Birmingham, registered profits in May of $10.5bn. The tech giants like Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft make profits that are larger than the economies of small countries.
CEOs who won’t admit they’ve been ‘sold a pup’
They do not want any checks or regulations that could hamper this gold rush. Interestingly, in the media, the tech giants have rushed to defend CrowdStrike, despite their appalling error, as though it is “hey, just one of those things”. They fear that the wide, global spread of CrowdStrike failure will bring governments and regulators down on their collective heads. So its all for one, and one for all.
The current round of software scandals is being compounded by the blinkered intransigence of those Chief Executives and MDs who buy in these programmes to achieve ‘efficiencies’ (job cuts), to impress their boards and shareholders. They can never admit it when they have been sold a pup, fearing for their reputation (and comfortable salaries and bonuses), so usually just double-down for fear of being exposed as a modern day version of the emperor with ‘new’ (ie no) clothes.
Look at the attitude of Paula Vennells throughout the sub-post masters’ scandal, even right up into the public Inquiry. It was the same with the senior management and leaders of the Labour Group on Birmingham City Council during the Oracle debacle, right up until the time the commissioners were knocking at the door.
The industrial revolution led to regulation and controls after workers suffered the horrors of pollution, lead poisoning, epidemics, asbestos and all the rest. Equally, the ‘digital revolution’ should be no exception – regulate the tech companies now, with independent reviews and checks of their product claims, so we don’t get any more cowboy software builders whose next shiny, magic ‘digital solution’ is our future misery.
