It was a trio tech security firm, CrowdStrike, software leader Microsoft and Delta Airlines that compounded a mis-guided software update into a business disrupting cascade, leading affected businesses to act badly in the face of serious network disruption.

Here is how Tech Crunch characterized a bit of very bad business from CrowdStrike in July. “Businesses across the world are reporting IT outages, including Windows ‘blue screen of death’ errors on their computers, in what has already become one of the most widespread IT disruptions in recent years. The outage — linked to a software update — has affected computers running Microsoft Windows at organizations across various sectors, including airlines, banks, retailers, brokerage houses, media companies and railway networks. The travel sector seems to be one of the hardest hit.”

The travel sector, indeed. The chaos resulting from a bit of bad code pushed to customers globally led Delta to implement its own family separation policy. The New York Times put it this way: “(Delta’s) suspension of travel for unaccompanied minors, a measure implemented with little notice, left some children stranded across state lines or even in different countries, and it left families scrambling to book last minute flights on other airlines or arrange alternative transportation.” 

It might have seemed prudent to keep traveling minors in one place while frantic agents dealt with crowded terminals, but plans disrupted without notice tend to unsettle passengers. And here is the (gut) punchline:  “The travel suspension, on top of the airline’s continued cancellations and delays, has shaken some customers’ long-held loyalty.”

You might ask how a single code update could cause such chaos. Well, as we seek to simplify the technology in our lives, it becomes more complex. If The Atlantic is right, it is only going to get worse. Here is how they put it:

“(O)ur technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. These are not computer programs built by a single individual; they are the work of many hands over the span of many years. They are the interaction of countless components that might have been designed in a specific way for reasons that no one remembers.”

It’ll take a village for us to move our systems from fragile to robust.