The tech hiccup that led to global disaster.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Last Friday felt like something out of a Y2K nightmare after the Cyber company CrowdStrike pushed a software update to all of its

clients which include health care systems, banks, and even the federal government that

ended up crashing computer systems worldwide.

The fallout is still being felt, particularly in the travel sector as

airliners try to reschedule canceled flights while trying to get everything back to normal.

It's also become something of a wake-up call, a reminder that the internet and a lot of the online

services we rely on are pretty delicate. Kate Conger is a reporter with the

New York Times and recently wrote about this with her colleague David Stritefeld.

We tend to think of the internet as just something that's floating around in the air with us, like oxygen, and it's not. It's actually a very complicated system that is full of infrastructure and I think the infrastructure

of that is really interesting and really fragile because it was built at a time

when we had no idea what role the internet would come to play in our lives.

So, you know, there's sort of the physical infrastructure of the internet itself,

these undersea cables that carry the internet around the world from place to place.

You know, then we have the DNS service, which is what all of our websites live on, and that

is a very complicated and fragile system that was not really designed with the modern internet in mind.

You know, and then we layer on top of that apps and updates and all these different parts of the web and it becomes this very complex system

That's built on an underlying infrastructure that we never really see or think about but is quite fragile.

You know, I mean you think of it as sort of like a little decaying subway system

that's kind of hidden underneath the earth and we're just up above.

Sure.

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