Unforgiving consumers says poor software is as bad as contaminated food

A new survey from software delivery platform Harness finds that 66 percent of UK consumers think software companies releasing 'bad' code that causes mass outages is on par with, or worse than, supermarkets selling contaminated products that break laws on food safety.

The study of 2,000 UK consumers, conducted by Opinium Research, finds that 44 percent have been affected by an IT outage. 26 percent were impacted by the recent incident caused by a software update from CrowdStrike in July 2024.

Of those affected by the outages 34 percent were unable to access a website or app, 25 percent couldn’t pay for goods or services using a card or digital payment method, 25 percent couldn't access online banking, 24 percent had their trains or flights cancelled or delayed, 21 percent had their organization was impacted so they were unable to work, 21 percent were unable to withdraw cash, 17 percent had packages they ordered delayed, and 12 percent had their hospital or doctor's appointments canceled or delayed.

Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO at Harness, says, "As software has come to play such a central role in our daily lives, the industry needs to recognize the importance of being able to deliver innovation without causing mass disruption. That means getting the basics right every time and becoming more rigorous when applying modern software delivery practices. For example, simple steps like canary deployments could have drastically reduced the impact of the problems CrowdStrike encountered, by ensuring the update only went to a few devices to begin with. This would have helped its engineers to identify potential issues early and mitigate them before they snowballed into a global IT meltdown."

Following the CrowdStrike disruption 41 percent of respondents say they're less trusting of companies that have IT outages. More than a third (34 percent) have changed their behavior because of outages. Changes include ensuring they have cash available (19 percent), keeping more physical documents (15 percent), and using a wider range of companies -- for example multiple banks -- to avoid being impacted by outages (11 percent).

People are also keen to see tighter controls, 74 percent say there should be regulation to ensure companies are held accountable for delivering 'bad' or poor-quality software updates that lead to IT outages. Many go further, claiming software firms that put out bad updates should compensate affected companies (52 percent) and be fined by the government (37 percent). 18 percent of consumers say these companies should be suspended from trading.

You can find out more on the Harness site.

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