By Deborah Haynes, security and defence editor
The mass global IT chaos – impacting a swathe of sectors from airlines and GP surgeries to news organisations and banks – shows the vulnerability of daily life to technology when it fails.
The colossal outage, which has spread around the world, is currently not understood to have been caused by a nefarious cyber attack.
Instead, it is thought to have been triggered by a software update.
However given the scale of the disruption, this disaster is one of the starkest ever reminders of just how powerful cyber and software could be if used as a weapon.
While this outage does not appear to have been caused deliberately, it underlines the fragility of the modern world to technology given that most areas of life rely on some form of computer systems and lines of code.
It means, the way of life in people in nations, across continents and around the globe can be brought to a halt – or at the very least inconvenienced – by a single faulty piece of software.