Ian W
There will be more of these complete machine failures unless the IT world relearns how to provide fault tolerance and non-stop systems.
There will be more of these complete machine failures when the Directors of the Board pay the money!
I was in telecommunications and IT for 27 years, including mission critical stuff for banking. After the recession of 90/91, it was all about saving money. One small example: A friend of mine who works for a small software company still get faced by the Boss telling the staff to put their development plans on hold as he just sold sone new feature to a customer. A feature that had been dropped from the development plan for a good reason. That is within the last month.
On this scale of events: as has been said above, there are too many systems, many of them legacy that do not dovetail well together. irrespective of the outsoucing problem (and it is a problem) this level of complexity, to provide ever more features and services - will fail.