LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - Elements of Friday's global

IT outage, which grounded planes and hit services from banking

to healthcare, have occurred before and until more contingencies

are built into networks, and organisations put better back-up

plans in place, it will happen again.

Friday's outage was caused by an update that U.S.

cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) pushed to its clients

early on Friday morning which conflicted with Microsoft's ( MSFT )

Windows operating system, rendering devices around the

world inoperable.

CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) has one of the largest shares of the highly

competitive cybersecurity market that provides such tools,

leading some industry analysts to question whether control over

such operationally critical software should remain in the hands

of just a handful of companies.

But the outage has also raised concerns among experts that

many organisations are not well-prepared to implement

contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT

system, or a piece of software within it, goes down.

At the same time there are also more solvable digital

disasters looming on the horizon, with perhaps the biggest

global IT challenge since the Millennium Bug, the "2038

Problem", just under 14 years away - and, this time, the world

is infinitely more dependent on computers.

"It's easy to jump at the idea that this is disastrous and

therefore suggest there must be a more diverse market and, in an

ideal world, that's what we'd have," said Ciaran Martin, former

head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of

the country's GCHQ intelligence agency.

"We're actually good at managing the safety aspects of tech

when it comes to cars, trains, planes, and machines. What we're

bad at is then providing services," he added.

"Look at what happened to the London health system a few

weeks ago - they were hacked, and that led to loads of cancelled

operations, which is physically dangerous," he said, referring

to a recent ransomware incident which affected Britain's

National Health Service (NHS).

Organisations need to look around their IT systems, Martin

said, and ensure there are enough failsafes and redundancies in

those systems to stay operational in the event of an outage.

Friday's outage happened amid a perfect storm, with both

Microsoft ( MSFT ) and CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) owning huge shares of a market which

relies on both of their products.

"I'm sure the regulators globally are looking at this. There

is limited competition globally for operating systems, for

example, and also for the large scale cybersecurity products

like the ones CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) provides," said Nigel Phair, a

cybersecurity professor at Australia's Monash University.

Friday's outage hit airlines particularly hard, as many

scrambled to check in and board passengers who relied upon

digital tickets to fly. Some travellers posted photos on social

media of hand-written boarding cards provided by airline staff.

Others were only able to fly if they had printed out their

ticket.

"I think it's very important for organisations of all shapes

and sizes to really look at their risk management and look at an

all-hazards approach," Phair said.

EPOCHALYPSE NOW

Friday's outage will not be the last time the world is

reminded of its dependency on computers and IT products for

basic services to function. In about 14 years' time, the world

will be faced with a time-based computer issue similar to the

Millennium Bug called the "2038 Problem".

The Millennium Bug, or "Y2K" happened because early

computers saved expensive memory space by only counting the last

two digits of the year, meaning many systems were unable to

distinguish between the year 1900 and 2000, leading to critical

errors.

The cost to mitigate the problem in the years before 2000

ran up a global bill of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The 2038 problem, or "Epochalypse", which begins at 0314 GMT

on Jan. 19, 2038, is, in essence, the same problem.

Many computers count the passage of time by measuring the

number of seconds since midnight on Jan. 1, 1970, also known as

the "Epoch".

Those seconds are stored as a finite sequence of zeroes and

ones, or "bits" but for many computers, the number of bits that

can be stored reaches its maximum value in 2038.

"We currently have a situation where there's huge global

disruption, because we cannot cope administratively," said

Ciaran Martin, the former NCSC head.

"We can cope in terms of safety, but we can't cope in terms

of service provision when key networks go down".