Security expert talks about impact of Crowdstrike outage

AUSTIN (KXAN) - As Austin and the world recover from Friday's Crowdstrike outage, a University of Texas at Austin professor said the failure is a reminder of the importance of backups.

Kumar Muthuraman is a professor at the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management and the Department of Finance at the McCombs School of Business.

Muthuraman told KXAN Friday afternoon that the outage at Austin-based Crowdstrike and the problems it caused showed how interconnected the world is.

"When one domino falls, it's certainly going to knock out a ton of other dominoes across the world. And we can certainly hope that we minimize these incidences, and we are better prepared for them," Muthuraman said.

"And there's no way we're going back to where we were, which is a non-interconnected world, every conceivable object that we can think of, we are trying to hook it to the internet, my son's toothbrush is connected to the internet."

Kumar Muthuraman
Professor, Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management and the Department of Finance at the McCombs School of Business, UT Austin

Muthuraman said companies could protect themselves by investing in backup systems so that disruptions don't turn into "catastrophic failure(s)."