Zoe Kleinman
Technology editor

It’s now around 36 hours since we first started seeing blue
screens of death pop up in alarming numbers. How’s everybody getting on?

Many systems are now back online, although spare a thought for
the world’s IT departments this weekend who may not have got any sleep yet.

As the chaos diminishes, people are starting to ask some big
questions. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, one of the UK’s top computer
scientists, compared what we’ve just been through to the pandemic this morning
on the BBC’s Today programme on Radio 4.

“By and large [these systems] are working to very high
levels of quality,” he said. “But when they do go wrong, and it’s
like a pandemic, what lessons do we draw as individuals?”

He said the immediate priority is “resilience” –
otherwise known as having a Plan B.

“We should perhaps think about having multiple systems, not
just depending on one now,” he said.

The reason this outage caused such havoc is because of the
millions of businesses, services and platforms around the world whose tech
infrastructures run on the same products.

In the last 24 hours I’ve heard plenty of people say they intend
to start carrying cash again, and are considering having more than one computer
at home.

Quite how long this legacy
will last remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to have got the world
thinking about the fragility of digital life.