http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE9IchvpOPk
Within the next few years, we may even be unlocking our doors with high-tech watches after being chauffeured home in robotic cars.
Technology's relentless march demands better security measures to prevent hackers from breaking into system and more rigid programming standards to reduce the chances of crippling outages, said Lillian Ablon, a technology researcher for the Rand Corp.
"Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start," she said. "We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things."
The sequence of Wednesday's outages appears to have been a fluke. Sabotage isn't suspected, FBI Director James Comey said during an appearance before Congress.
But a domino effect may have contributed to The Wall Street Journal's outage. Comey believes the newspaper's website buckled after the New York Stock Exchange's problems caused alarmed investors looking for information to swamp the Journal's website.
The length of Wednesday's outages also is disconcerting, Gartner's Litan said.
It took the New York Stock Exchange more than three-and-half hours to resume trading, slowing Wall Street's usually furious pace. A "router issue" at United Airlines grounded its planes for nearly two hours, leading to 800 flight delays and 60 cancellations.
"Everyone needs to assume technology is going to go down sometimes, but you should be resilient enough to quickly recover from the outage within a half hour, if not a few minutes," Litan said.
