What is Software Fragility and Why Should You Care?
A guest post by James Bore from Bores consultancy.
March 2024 has been bad for software faults, with global issues plaguing McDonalds to kick everything off. These were followed in quick succession with UK-wide payment processing issues affecting major supermarket chains Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
Greggs then took a dive, again with payment card issues, before a final outage at Nationwide prevented people from moving money between their accounts finished off the week.
Mutterings about cyber attacks appeared, but there was no evidence of these and the damage would have been much more dramatic if the faults were deliberate.
If not deliberate, then what happened, and what does software fragility mean?
Software Fragility
Software fragility is what happens to large, complex software systems as they grow and grow, more and more layers being developed and added on as the owning companies expand. You can think of it as a house which starts off as a serviceable hut, but over the years more and more temporary rooms get glued on to meet new needs without any changes to the foundations or utilities.
Eventually you reach the point where turning a tap on in the kitchen can cause an electrical short in the bedroom, or pulling out a chair in the dining room makes tiles slide off the roof. Everything is interconnected in such complex ways they’re complete unpredictable, and to make any real improvement you’d be better bulldozing the place and starting over with proper foundations.
But you can’t, because you need to live there, so you slap some paint on the walls, buy a rug to cover the holes in the floor, and pray it will keep going for just a little longer since you’ve never kept track of how it all fits together.
Whether it was an update to some small component of the software, a tiny change in part of the system, or just an aging computer finally keeling over, suddenly you’re hit by unpredictable issues which take hours or longer to investigate and fix.
Why Should You Care?
As the company, these issues are inconvenient. You lose a day’s trading maybe, but if you’re a large enough company that means little. It’s annoying, and hurts your reputation, but news rebounds quickly so with the right publicity everyone will have forgotten in a week.
As a person? Then these issues can be catastrophic. We’re lucky in that the recent ones were mainly inconvenient rather than serious – preventing people from paying with cards and not lasting more than a day.
But we live in a world where cash is less and less accessible to people, with banks leaving the high street and cash machines becoming rare (and in the case of Sainsbury’s, their machines were affected as well).
Worse, supermarkets drive local independent shops out of business and have largely destroyed them over the years. If we think about a case where a couple of major supermarkets are unable to take payments for a week, local shops could never keep up with demand. Without alternatives this can go very quickly from inconvenience to crisis.
What Can You Do About It?
The concerning answer here is that there’s little we as individuals can do.
We can have emergency cash, but with the right faults large companies wouldn’t be able to accept cash either.
We could try and support local independents, but for many of us that shop has “saled” and even where they are an option they don’t have the capacity to replace the larger supermarkets.
The large companies don’t have the incentive to really buckle down and fix their systems, as each layer of sticking plasters increases the difficulties of inspecting and fixing the foundations. The investment and effort to truly fix the problem is too expensive to justify, especially when the only impact is a few days of bad headlines, quickly forgotten with new loyalty card offers.
And it isn’t just payment systems – these problems exist in many of the systems large companies have used for a long time, such as logistics systems. Without a concerted effort to fix software fragility we are going to rapidly find ourselves sinking into a quagmire of faults, with nowhere to turn to.
Any fix here has to be the result of a concerted effort by consumers – large enterprises aren’t going to address it on their own as there’s little advantage for them, and in many cases the technology they depend on is seen as nothing more than a cost overhead.
Where you can find James Bore
More from James on The Complaining Cow website
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