NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Betsy Cooper, a cybersecurity expert at the Aspen Institute, about this week's major Internet outages and the world's dependence on a handful of web services companies.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
You may have woken up yesterday morning to find that the website you were trying to browse was down. Or maybe you went to Spotify and it wasn't working, or YouTube, or X, or ChatGPT, or even a website called Downdetector that tracks internet outages. They all fell too. You see, they all rely on Cloudflare, which offers internet infrastructure services. He discovered a bug in one of the services he provides. And if you're thinking, didn't this just happen? Yes, that's true. Last month, separate outages at Microsoft's cloud service and Amazon Web Services also caused widespread outages.
All of these recent incidents remind us of how dependent the modern Internet is on a small handful of technology companies. When things like this happen, we often turn to cybersecurity expert Betsy Cooper of the Aspen Institute. Welcome.
BETSY COOPER: It's so great to be here.
CHANG: It's so great to have you here physically. Well, Cloudflare's CEO explained that all of this was caused by some internal problem in one of its cybersecurity services, and not by the cyberattack itself. Let me just ask you, can one mistake in one company really lead to global IT consequences like we see?
COOPER: Absolutely possible. And I was trying to use ChatGPT when it all went wrong…
CHANG: (Laughter).
COOPER: …And that's how I found out about it. I want you to just imagine that you're working on a Google Doc, and it's a really big Google Doc. You keep adding more information to it. Suddenly it stops working and your computer needs to restart. In fact, this is exactly what happened in Cloudflare's internal systems.
CHANG: Wow. It's scary. I mean, how did so much power end up being concentrated in so few companies?
COOPER: Well, companies have a lot of market power not only on these topics, but on others as well. You mentioned Amazon. Of course, I use Amazon a lot for shopping, not just browsing the web.
CHANG: Same thing.
COOPER: Microsoft too.
CHANG: Yes.
COOPER: I mean, we use this for our email platforms. So when these companies have the ability to sort of shift resources and have the finances that allow them to support these very expensive pieces of cloud infrastructure, they can come in and get a larger market share than a smaller company that might not be able to get millions of dollars from other lines of business to support that work.
CHANG: But you think it's good? I ask because the Cloudflare outage only lasted four hours? And then it was decided. But even a small glitch can harm a business, right? In fact, Cloudflare's CEO said, “I'm sorry for the pain we've caused the Internet today.” Is there a movement, Betsy, to get the government more involved in this, for example, to make these private internet companies more reliable?
COOPER: So I haven't heard much about movement in that direction. And anyway, this week we heard about a move in the opposite direction. Thus, the issue of limiting what states can do in terms of regulating AI could potentially appear in the National Defense Authorization Act. You asked if it was good.
CHANG: Yes.
COOPER: And I think that's good and bad. So for a small business that doesn't have a lot of technical sophistication, it's actually a good thing that you have an Amazon, Google, or Cloudflare security infrastructure supporting your business, because if you try to build your own tech stack to do the job, it will likely be even more problematic.
CHANG: Okay.
COOPER: I think it's really difficult for the larger companies, you know, the global down detectors, ChatGPT. For businesses like this, you really need a backup plan. You need a way to move your systems from one location to another so that you can quickly recover if something like this happens.
CHANG: Of course. Well, then what is the answer to making these things happen less often?
COOPER: So first, scenario planning. You need to understand your systems and prepare for such developments. For example, I'd love to hear Cloudflare talk about how they prepared for something like this and why they were able to limit the outages because they actually kind of ran a scenario where they lived it out and figured out who was going to call who and who was on emergency duty to try to identify the file. So if they don't do it, they definitely need to do it.
And second, we all, as a society, need to be prepared for the Internet to not be perfect, just as we prepare for our utilities to not be perfect. So we need the equivalent of digital backup generators. We must be able to plan for a possible power outage. How can you ensure your most critical services continue to run smoothly even if this happens?
CHANG: Betsy Cooper is the founding director of the Aspen Academy of Politics. Thank you very much for coming today.
COOPER: I'm so glad to be here. Thanks again.
CHANG: And note: Both Amazon and Microsoft are financial backers of NPR.
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