Last week, airports, 911 systems, banks, hospitals, government offices, and a slew of private companies ground to a halt due to a cybersecurity glitch. It turns out that CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity firm, was the culprit. What CrowdStrike does impacts almost the entire technological infrastructure around the world because it counts Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Intel among its biggest clients.

We noticed.

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On Friday, July 19, CrowdStrike released an update to its flagship security software, Falcon Sensor. This software lets CrowdStrike remotely analyze and check for cyber threats and malware on computer systems. The update contained a defect that caused any Windows-based computer on which the software was installed to crash without fully loading its operating system.

How an Update Caused a Global Crash

According to the website TechCrunch, Windows-based computers were faced with the dreaded “blue screen of death,” a blue error screen with a message that the operating system has encountered a critical failure and cannot load.

CrowdStrike has since issued a statement that it has identified and isolated the issue and deployed a fix while stressing that it was not a cyber-attack. On Wednesday they also published an incident report explaining the incident in great detail. They predict that it would take some time — in many cases weeks — for computer systems affected by the outage to be repaired and return to normal function. The residual effects of the outage are still lingering. For instance, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson, the busiest airport in the world, was still awash with travelers waiting to rebook canceled flights four days after the outage.

To add insult to injury, criminals are already taking advantage of the chaos with scams, offering fake solutions to fix the damage caused by the CrowdStrike outage.

The fact that a single defect in a software update can cause the entire man-made world to come to a complete stop shows how vulnerable we have become. Technology touts itself as progress, making life easier, opening up greater possibilities, and bringing the world together while hiding that our dependence on it makes us weak and vulnerable to glitches and attacks. We have become so dependent on internet-based technology that we no longer have another way to run things – from governments to airlines to banks and businesses.

The more we rely on computer hardware made by human hands and software devised by human brains, the more vulnerable we become. “To err is human,” we say. When those errors occur in the stuff that runs our entire world, the result is chaos, disrupted lives, lost revenues, interrupted services, and even an inability to govern a city or nation effectively and respond to life-threatening emergencies.

A Modern-Day Tower of Babel

Sound familiar? There is nothing new under the sun, and our push toward globally connected technology is just another expression of man trying to be God. We build our hope on these developments to control our daily lives and future. We think we can manage our planet – God’s creation – with technological developments. Man wanting to be God is a recurring theme in the Scriptures, and it reached an early peak when early humans, having forgotten the lessons of the Flood, wanted to build a tower that would reach heaven. Genesis 11: 4-6 describes their actions and motive:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them (ESV).

That has been man’s drive ever since then: that nothing will be impossible. Not to mention the push to overcome the consequences of the Tower of Babel – the scattering of the nations and the confusion of language – through globalization in which internet connectivity plays a significant part.

Spiritual Ramifications

In light of that, what spiritual ramifications does a software update causing a global computer crash have?

First, it exposes that man-made things are flawed, no matter how advanced they are in technological complexity and capacity to perform tasks and run worldwide commerce, healthcare, monetary, and government systems. People make mistakes, and mistakes on a global scale cause chaos and suffering. We cannot make anything perfect and foolproof – we just don’t know it.

Secondly, it exposes that man lacks foresight and wisdom despite thinking he is God. There were no backup plans when the outage struck. Governments had to close their offices, major airlines all over the world had to cancel all their flights, banks could not move money around, hospitals struggled to care for their patients, and as many as 29,000 businesses had to send their employees home, losing untold millions of dollars in revenue. Cloud-based global connectivity is now all-or-nothing. Wisdom would prompt organizations to have backup plans in case technology fails.

Thirdly, it exposes that man places his faith in the wrong things. We go about our day assuming that the technology around us will work. Occasionally, we are confronted with temporary and local outages due to storms, work crews breaking underground cables, or our laptops wearing out and doing weird things. But we trust things will all go back to normal in a jiffy. We place our faith in machinery because that is what we are most familiar with. Faith in God would cause us to hear from Him and receive His wisdom on how to continue thriving when the man-made world becomes chaotic. It warns us not to be friends with the world (see James 4:4). That does not mean using technology is wrong. It does mean that depending more on technology than on God and the natural resources He has given us is sin.

Fourthly, it exposes man’s vulnerability to evil. The CrowdStrike debacle was an error. However, computers can be hacked, causing similar or even greater chaos. We saw that chaos can be exploited by evil actors promoting scans. Software can be used for all kinds of evil things. Systems can be taken over to control us because we depend on them and have no other way to manage our finances, find our way around, shop, and pay our bills.

How To Pray

Understanding these spiritual ramifications is important for intercessors because they inform our prayers. Here are a few suggestions for prayer as you listen to the Holy Spirit to direct you (see Romans 8:26):

• Pray that the suffering and anxiety the global outage has caused will encourage people to seek God — that they will recognize their sin, repent, and place their faith in God and His divine purposes.
• Pray that God opens our governments’ eyes to the need for backup plans.
• Pray for God’s children worldwide to seek Him for wisdom (see James 1:5) to be prepared for widespread technology disruptions and pursue a life of reliance on God and wise planning guided by the Holy Spirit.
• Pray for the Church to exude peace and faith as an example to those who don’t know Christ.
• Pray that God will bring good out of bad and use disasters such as these and evil uses of technology for His purposes in the world.
• Pray for churches and Christian organizations affected by these outages to be restored to full functionality quickly.

Father in heaven, forgive us for building new Towers of Babel through technology and give us the wisdom to have ways and means to fall back on. Give wisdom to our government leaders to develop plans for when technology fails. May many see the bad side of too much reliance on technology and place their faith in You and Your design for human life. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

 Has the Lord given you insight about the modern dependence on technology? Please share in the comments.

Remco Brommet is a pastor, spiritual-growth teacher, and prayer leader with over 40 years of experience in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the U.S. He was born and raised in the Netherlands and pastored his first church in Amsterdam. He moved to the U.S. in 1986. He and his wife, Jennifer, live north of Atlanta. When not writing books, he blogs at www.deeperlifeblog.com and assists his wife as a content developer and prayer coordinator for True Identity Ministries. Jennifer and Remco are passionate about bringing people into a deeper relationship with Christ. Photo credit: Canva.