The term “computer glitch” has become a shorthand way of avoiding responsibility for failures when information technology doesn’t work. With IT underlying so much of our lives and economy we should expect to know what went wrong and why.
It has been a busy week for the computer glitch. On Wednesday, July 8, United Airlines grounded flights nationwide, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading for more than three-and-a-half hours, and the Wall Street Journal’s website went offline. But there is no need to worry. It was just a computer glitch.
I’m tired of hearing about the “glitch.” At one time it might have been useful as a non-technical term to describe a general problem. But in recent years, as computers and networking have come to underpin so much of our lives and economy, it has become a way to trivialize problems and avoid responsibility when information technology doesn’t work. It is used by officials speaking to the press as shorthand for “it couldn’t have been avoided.” It is used by the press as shorthand for, “we don’t know what happened, and you wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
IT and cybersecurity no longer are obscure domains. Our livelihoods; our entertainment; our healthcare; our ability to travel from one place to another, whether by plane, train or automobile, all depend on the information infrastructure. With the emergence of the Internet of Everything, every person and every device now is an endpoint vulnerable to exploitation, putting everything around them—and thousands of miles away—at risk.
We all should be computer savvy enough that when we hear the word “glitch” we demand more information.
This is not to say that we should all become expert in all things IT. I don’t understand the error messages that my own PC gives me. And this is not to say that some reporting does not go beyond the glitch. The United grounding reportedly was due to a network connectivity problem, the NYSE stoppage due to an upgrade that failed, and the WSJ outage due to high demand.
But too often, little more is offered by the agencies and organizations involved, little more is provided in the news coverage, and little more is demanded by the public.
Things don’t just happen for no reason. They happen because hardware or software fail, procedures and policies were inadequate or not followed, or somebody did something malicious or stupid (or maybe just unexpected). When I pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for an airline ticket, I have a right to know why a connectivity problem turned my ticket into wastepaper. Where was the backup, the failover, the redundancy? When an international stock exchange shuts down, as an investor I should expect to know why the upgrade failed. Wasn’t it tested? Was it not tested with the proper configurations? Where was the back up and restoration capability? And wsj.com is behind a paywall. If I have paid to get behind that wall I have a right to know why they did not have the capacity to let me in when I wanted to find out why the stock market had crashed (in both senses of the word).
The Internet is incredibly complex. Even a modern operating system running on a single computer is too complex for the people who developed it to understand all of its interactions with the applications it was designed to support. Stuff will happen. But “stuff happens” is not an explanation. When big stuff happens we should expect to know what happened and why.
It’s time to ditch the “glitch” and expect better answers.