Dr Ayman El Hajjar for BBC Radio London on the global IT outage

This segment for BBC Radio London covered the global IT outage that recently struck due to a software update from independent cybersecurity company Crowdstrike on 18 July. This tech failure severely affected many countries across the world in numerous services and organisations. Some of these include General Practitioners at the National Health Service (NHS) England facing a challenging time with their patient record system, thousands of flights being grounded and one-third of drug deliveries to pharmacies in England being delayed.

Dr Hajjar said that he is not very surprised by this interruption as this has happened before with Metaverse platforms Facebook and WhatsApp on 4 October 2021. He agreed that once a major service provider is affected, it can cause a domino effect and affect many other aspects.

He said that it would be a “very long weekend” for IT and support teams across the world to recover from this incident due to the heavy backlog and data they take in. He mentioned that Crowdstrike are now considering reverting to one of their older software versions which were working efficiently, which not only will cause a lot of losses for the company but will also take a lot of time for large-scale organisations to adapt to as it will cause delays in the general processes and logistics of an organisation.

Dr Hajjar addresses the importance for businesses to have a disaster recovery plan in place during times of crisis like this. He said: “For businesses to go completely back to normal, they need to have a proper continuity plan in place. This IT outage crisis is actually an important incident for us to recognise and remember that disaster recovery is extremely essential.”

He went on to talk about the world’s reliance on IT systems and technology. He added: “It is hard to go back to basics like pen and paper at this point. We are relying on technology to the point where one service can bring the whole world to a standstill. What we need is more processes set in place in these organisations to fix or avoid such problems.”

Dr Ayman Hajjar has been a part of the Westminster community since 2015 and is mainly involved in teaching security modules in the School of Computer Science and Engineering. With the help of the team, he was able to obtain the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) certification for the Cyber Security and Forensics MSc course. His research focuses on looking at how existing security protocols can be used on infrastructure-less decentralised networks such as blockchain networks and the Internet of Things.

Listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds.