An owner of a consumer insights research firm couldn’t pay her employees, make Friday’s deadline to sign a contract for a new business or send key research to a key client. A psychiatrist, who runs a virtual mental health practice in Maryland, saw his business hobbled as some of his virtual assistants and therapists couldn’t either make phone calls or log on to their computers. And a restaurant owner in New York City was worried about how he was going to pay his vendors and his workers.
Businesses from airlines to hospitals have been grappling with a faulty software update that caused technological havoc worldwide on Friday, and its repercussions continued through the weekend. The breadth of the outages highlighted the fragility of a digitized world dependent on a few providers for key computing services.
But the problem appeared to divide those affected into haves and have-nots. Major customers of Microsoft and CrowdStrike are getting IT support to resolve the issues, but many smaller businesses whose Windows PCs may have received the problematic update are still struggling.
Take Tsvetta Kaleynska, owner and founder of the Manhattan-based consumer insights company RILA Global Consulting, which has Fortune 500 clients. By Saturday, she had resolved the payroll issue and gotten an extension until Monday on a research project. But the prospective client will now not move forward with the new contract, cutting her annual earnings by nearly 25%, she estimates. The problem: She couldn’t sign the contract because Docusign, which runs on Microsoft software affected by the faulty update, was down.
“If I were part of a big company, then I would be able to delegate and get support from computer science or security services,” Kaleynska says. “But as a small business owner, I am depending only on myself. It’s pretty devastating.”
