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The Civil Aviation Authority warns that although there were no delays to NZ flights, the ripple effect caused by groundings in the US and elsewhere could have an impact here over the weekend. Photo / Getty Images.

Former Microsoft exec: Diversifying tech landscape may not be enough to protect from global outages

Author: Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024, 8:07am

Belief it's not as simple as diversifying New Zealand's technology landscape to protect us from global IT outages.

Friday's global outage - which impacted an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft machines - was triggered by an update from global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

Former Microsoft National Technology Officer Russell Craig told Mike Hosking there's no denying we are hugely reliant on big tech.

“But they bring us a lot of benefits. Although it’s appealing to think if we had more smaller players, we’d have more diversity and less risk, but I don’t know whether that stacks up.”

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