Port shutdowns highlight issues with tech in business

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – Truck drivers and ship crews are working double time to get their deliveries back on schedule after a software issue caused the Port of Charleston to shut down for nearly two days.

The very technology that helps manage one of the busiest ports in the nation is now being blamed for its crippling closure Sunday night which lasted until around 11 a.m. Tuesday.

The short shutdown may not seem like a big deal, but its impact can’t be understated. Nearly $100 billion passes through the Port of Charleston each year, according to the South Carolina Ports Authority’s own numbers. That means the shutdown may have cost anywhere from $200-$500 million.

Shutdowns because of technology failures are not unique to the ports but do highlight the significant drawbacks facing organizations that heavily rely on technology.

LaQuinta Yates is the dean of business technology at Trident Technical College. She says new technology is always going to play a role in business.

“Technology offers significant benefits to business. It can increase efficiency, cost savings as well as improve data management,” Yates said. “Of course, it can also have some negative aspects to it. Those things include security risks, dependency and complexity with integration.”

Hackers have disrupted the healthy energy sectors across the nation and software malfunctions have now been linked to the injury of hundreds of patients who were using insulin pumps.

Perhaps the most significant example of tech causing problems is when a ground stop was issued over a busy holiday travel season in Jan. of last year. The Federal Aviation Administration blamed that problem on a corrupted data file.

The Consortium for Information & Software Quality estimates poor software cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion in 2020.

Yates says businesses need to have a game plan for when software breaks down.

“There are also incident response plans. I think that’s really what we are talking about here – is having a response plan so when these things do go down, what are we going to do to mitigate the damage as quickly as possible?” Yates said. “A lot of time people think it has to be a cyberattack. It doesn’t have to be a cyberattack. It could be as simple as the software is not compatible with what you have and you upgrade and it all of a sudden doesn’t work with what you had before and so when those things happen it’s going to cause a company to lose money.”

Authorities at the ports say the issue at the ports was not a cybersecurity problem. Yates says that is a key distinction that customers and employees should take note of because it means their personal data was not compromised.

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