by Charles Miller

Shortly after I woke last Friday I was greeted by several emails from early-risers inquiring about the worldwide internet outage then occurring. Headlines on news websites read "Largest IT Outage in History" and "Global Chaos." The fact that I was effortlessly able to pull up every news web site I tried allayed my fears about the "worldwide internet outage" being as dire as some reporting presented it as being. A couple of quotes attributed to so-called cyber security experts stood out to me. The first was "This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world's core internet infrastructure" The other was "All of these systems are running the same software." Both of these quotes while not being demonstrably false do most certainly convey the wrong impression.

The server outage that occurred on the morning of Friday, July 19, 2024 was a serious widespread problem affecting Microsoft servers. So what exactly does than mean? First understand that "servers" in this context are heavy-duty hardware and software designed to process requests and deliver data to other servers on the internet. A server can be an ordinary laptop but more often are big purpose-built computers costing thousands of dollars. Second, understand that Microsoft does not dominate the server market like it does the desktop/laptop personal computer market.

Approximately 80% of all internet servers are estimated to run on one distribution (version) or another of the Linux Operating System (OS). In contrast, Microsoft Windows servers account for an estimated 20% of the total server market. That 20% of the internet's servers that do use Microsoft Windows are often enterprise environments where specific Microsoft applications or services are required. Friday's major internet outage has shown this includes airlines, banks, hospitals, government offices, and others. What about Apple? MacOS is designed for personal computing and is not optimized for server environments and thus rarely used as a server.

So what is Linux? Far from being monolithic as is Microsoft, Linux is made up of many different distributions (versions) that differ one from another as different makes of automobiles differ one from another. Of course Cadillac and Toyota have enough in common to be able to use the same roads, but they are different. That 80% of the internet's servers that run on Linux is fragmented among several different distributions produced by different companies including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, and others.

To an outsider this "community" of different Linux distributions sometimes seems more like a bunch of warring tribes that cannot agree on anything. Arguments over Mac versus PC have nothing on the Linux "community." At least automakers all agree that a car should have only one steering wheel.

I would like to believe that insofar as the internet is concerned, the disorganization and fragmentation of the Linux community is really a strength. Last Friday Microsoft found that one single update could cripple much of its 20% of the internet's servers. The many different distributions of Linux making up the 80% of the Linux servers on the internet are split up between different versions of Linux to the point that it is much less likely a single software update catastrophe could take down 80% of the internet's servers at once. Because not all of the Linux servers on the internet use the same version of Linux software they should never all experience the same failure at the same time as did Microsoft.

None of this is meant to belittle the problem. Microsoft's stumble has indeed created chaos for the airlines, banks, hotels, hospitals, and many other industries that rely on Microsoft's servers. But this event also demonstrates the resilience of the internet in that what one news site labeled as the "largest IT outage in history" seems to have not even been noticed by a large number of the people who use the internet every day.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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