Rebooted off

On cloud computing, traveling among the clouds, and the problems likely to bite us someday

A snafu on a Microsoft cloud computing platform forced the country's major airlines to ground flights, attracting undesirable consumer and regulatory attention to the airlines -- and at least some attention to Microsoft itself. The real culprit was a faulty backend update from CrowdStrike.

■ As cloud computing continues to expand the number of online activities that people can do while on the move, there's no end in sight to the increase in demand for that computing power. Especially for things that people need to do while on the move -- like retrieving information about airline reservations -- cloud computing is the logical place to turn.

■ But we overlook at our own peril the fact that "cloud" doesn't mean "trouble-free". One of the selling points for cloud computing services is that the vendor has to do the work to keep the computer infrastructure functioning, while the customer rests easy. Sometimes, that goes wrong. And when the systems involved are critical to lots of different systems, the damage can be widespread.

■ Chances seem very good that the cloud computing infrastructure in the United States will become a hot target for an adversarial government to attack sometime in the foreseeable future. What consequences that will have, we can't know. But they are likely to be troubling and expensive. Incidents like this one ought to be taken seriously as previews of much larger things that can go wrong.