Chaos persists as IT outage could take time to fix, says cybersecurity firm boss

Joe Tidy
Cyber correspondent

There’s an interesting and strange lesson amidst the chaos.

The biggest firms with the largest number of affected computers seem to be popping back up online the fastest.

This is what you’d expect, of course, but it possibly points to these larger richer companies having better resourcing of IT staff and better resilience measures in place.

The fix for this is largely a manual one and that means having IT staff at affected computers.

It’s the small and medium sized businesses that I think are struggling the most. They have fewer computers to fix but also fewer staff to go out and do the fixing.

For the big firms that make the headlines, this is largely proving to be short and sharp.

But, of course, we also don’t know what happens next with the backlogs of work, appointments, missed deadlines and general damage to organisations.

The most acute example of this is in airlines which are seemingly back online and running nearly normally, but with monstrous backlogs to work through.