What's behind all the UK IT failures this month?

Politicisation of technology.

It's a layer 8 problem. Human political expectations of technology are outpacing the engineering reality. Over the past two decades overselling of "utopias" mixed with professional management arrogance and ignoring engineers, experts and what people actually want.

That, plus a mixture of crony contracts and bad project management.

We've ended up with over-complex systems that we don't have the human capacity or money to maintain and secure.

A telling remark by a Labour politician to the question "What is the greatest concern about a 'cashless economy' was "Making sure people are not left behind".

In other words, we're forcing this on people whether they want it or not, and whether it works or not. The idea that there might be "risks" or necessary safeguards was simply not conceivable.

That's what happened with the Post Office Horizon system and it's what's happening with other new systems pushed out "for our own good"

That's not a remark against technology or modernisation, it's a criticism of bloody-minded recklessness and anti-democratic hubris.

Good technology requires care. We talk about it a lot here [0].

[0] https://cybershow.uk

McDonalds, Sainsbury, Tesco, barely matters. But Greggs, that's some serious shit depriving people of pies. We need answers.

Work is getting outsourced to India. Most CS grads don’t know how a computer works. People get hired for reasons other than merit. And ChatGPT…

All of these enterprises are examples where IT is a "cost center", not a "value center". So you have this conundrum where everything goes smooth and the higher ups ask "why do we spend so much money on this without anything in return?". And when something does go wrong they are likely to repeat said question.

Sainsburys said it was due to an error with "an overnight software update". Perhaps they all use the same software but updated at different times?

https://twitter.com/sainsburys/status/1768972295622553900

Maybe all the interns that were left in charge didn't properly do what the AI had said?

Random chance and years of underinvestment and tech debt

McDonald's wasn't unique to the UK as it was global. McDonald's Japan was affected.

They could definitely all be unconnected. It’s not that suspicious. I guess we’ll find out if they ever publish post mortems.

Do you have sources about the "outages" ? (did not make the headlines internationally..)

It they all shut down because of "a payment system", then a simple explanation would be a failure of... the same payment system that they all happen to use ?

(It's not like Greggs is going to fully develop a payment system in house without relying on any infra, I suppose ?)

McDonald was worldwide. Sainsbury, Tesco and Greggs seems to be related somehow? At least they are all payment related.

Mandatory cert rotation forced by a dependency that had a leak, and they all didn’t handle it properly. (Just a guess)

Probably leetcode.