Two incidents, only hours apart. The first was a Microsoft outage that brought down Outlook email and other services, harming millions of companies and users around the world. The second was a failure in the United States' telecommunications systems that completely halted air travel across America.
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The world has become a small village, and with every disruption the cost reaches everyone, from China to India, from the Arab world to Europe, as if the world were in the hands of a single programmer or subject to the same programming. In some respects, these failures cause damage more serious than major wars, because they shape the entire world and spare no one.
What can the countries of the Middle East do in such a case? They do not produce every kind of technology, nor do they produce software. Their only option seems to be to surrender to the situation and be affected by it, as though primitive systems and states are the ones that will survive when the fate of the world is handed to a single provider or a single system.
If these scenes are evidence of a cyberattack, it is likely they will happen again. Superiority in a country such as the United States is matched by superiority from China, Russia or other states. It is as if we are facing a war between parties with more advanced technologies, capable of destroying other countries without firing a single bullet.
It is enough to recall the hacking of thousands of major stores in Europe, the disabling of food refrigerators, the raising of their temperatures and the fires they caused. This means that tampering with the programming that generates electricity, airports, food storage, train movements, banks and ATMs, water networks and their purification, or telecommunications networks is possible in a major war, or if states decide to destroy one another through a cyberattack more dangerous than missiles.
The countries of the Middle East, including the Arab world, are both affected and mere spectators, however much they claim to have alternative systems, because we do not know what is being planned for this wretched region. Of its horrors, two kinds of states may survive: poor ones with no resources that anyone would want, and technologically backward ones that still operate with paper ledgers.
We cannot minimise what we saw in the Microsoft outage, the American airports and the disabled refrigerators in European stores. These incidents may not be separated from one another, because they carry the same message: cyberwarfare, which will harm the most advanced nations and peoples, leaving us with only regret. We were not among the pioneers of technology and digitisation, and we have nothing to lose compared with other peoples whose entire lives depend on programming and its derivatives in every aspect of life. Perhaps the only solution, without ignorance or neglect, is to preserve non-digital alternatives as far as possible for emergencies, and to keep daily data as much as possible locally, so we can return to it when needed.
Let us just imagine the internet going down across the world. What would become of the peoples of the world? Meanwhile, in this region, nothing would harm us. We would return to praising the moon, and we would look for a candle in the dark instead of cursing it.
