Humans 'losing digital control' warn experts after system crashes
Experts warn complexity, demand and greed are combining to crash computer systems of governments and businesses around the world
A series of system crashes affecting Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft in the past fortnight has brought warnings that governments, banks and big business are over-reliant on computer networks that have become too complex.
The alarm was sounded by industry experts in the aftermath of a three-hour network shutdown that paralysed the operation of the Nasdaq stock market in New York on Thursday.
Jaron Lanier, the author widely credited with popularising the concept of virtual reality, warned that digital infrastructure was moving beyond human control.
He said: "When you try to achieve great scale with automation and the automation exceeds the boundaries of human oversight there is going to be failure. That goes for governments, for consumer companies, for Google or a big insurance company.
"It is infuriating because it is driven by unreasonable greed. In many cases the systems that tend to fail, fail because of an attempt to make them run automatically with a minimal amount of human oversight."
The Nasdaq collapse was caused by a communication failure between its platform for processing quotes and trades and that of another party - reportedly the New York Stock Exchange. It resulted in a third fewer shares being traded in the United States that day.
"These outages are absolutely going to continue," said Neil MacDonald, a fellow at technology research firm Gartner.