Why system resilience should mainly be the job of the OS, not just third-party applications

Last week, a US congressional hearing regarding the CrowdStrike incident in July saw one of the company’s executives answer questions from policy makers. One point that caught my interest during the ensuing debate was the suggestion that future incidents of this magnitude could be avoided by some form of automated system recovery.

Without getting into the technical details of the incident and how it could have been avoided, the suggestion begs a fundamental question: should automated recovery be the responsibility of the third-party software vendor or is this better framed as a wider issue of the resilience of the operating system (OS), meaning that the latter initiates some form of auto-recovery process in collaboration with a third-party application?

A system that heals itself

A catastrophic boot error that causes a blue screen of death (BSOD) occurs when the device fails to load the software required to present the user ...