Beyond Black Swans: Why 'Grey Duck' Events Are the Real Threat to Business Resilience

A New Framework for Understanding the Risks We Create But Don't Plan For

When CrowdStrike's routine software update brought down 8.5 million computers worldwide on July 19, 2024, most executives called it a "Black Swan." They were wrong—and that mistake is costing them dearly.

The CrowdStrike incident wasn't an unpredictable catastrophe emerging from nowhere. Everyone in cybersecurity knew that endpoint security vendors have extraordinary access to systems. Everyone knew that software updates can go wrong. Everyone knew that modern businesses depend on a handful of major security providers. Yet somehow, when the predictable happened, we acted shocked.

This is what I call a "Grey Duck" event—and understanding the difference could save your business from the next inevitable disruption.

First, Let's Get Black Swans Right

Nassim Taleb's Black Swan theory revolutionized risk thinking, but it's been dangerously misunderstood. A true Black Swan isn't just any big, bad event. It has three specific characteristics:

• It's unprecedented in our experience. Before 9/11, nobody imagined terrorists would turn passenger planes into missiles. Before COVID-19, a century had passed since the last global pandemic. These events were literally outside our collective imagination.
• It's impossible to predict. Not unlikely—impossible. Nassim Taleb himself argues that the 2008 financial crisis was not a true Black Swan event, as it was both predictable and predicted by some risk experts. Housing markets had collapsed before (1920s, 1980s S&L crisis), and many analysts warned about the risks. What made it feel like a Black Swan was the hubris of thinking "this time is different"—classic human cognitive bias, not true unpredictability.
• It has extreme impact. Black Swans don't just hurt—they fundamentally reshape the world. 9/11 changed how we think about security. COVID-19 restructured entire industries. The printing press destroyed the monastery monopoly on knowledge.

Here's the crucial insight: most business disruptions aren't Black Swans. They're something else entirely—events that are possible, even likely in certain categories, but remote enough in people's minds that nobody bothers to plan for them.

Introducing the Grey Duck: The Risk We Breed but Don't Feed

Grey Duck events share three characteristics that make them both more common and more dangerous than Black Swans:

• They're "remote but possible" in people's minds. Everyone knows cloud providers can fail, software updates can break things, and key vendors can go belly-up. But these risks feel distant enough that we don't seriously plan for them. It's like earthquake insurance in California—everyone knows "the big one" is coming, but most people don't buy coverage.
• They affect large swaths of organizations through interconnectedness. The damage spreads not through fundamental system change (like Black Swans) but through the invisible web of dependencies we've built. When Microsoft's authentication service hiccups, thousands of SaaS applications stop working. When a single DNS provider fails, half the internet becomes unreachable.
• They're contained but cascading. Grey Ducks don't end civilization, but they can end your quarter. The 2021 Suez Canal blockage didn't collapse global trade, but it did create a $9.6 billion per day traffic jam. The recent Spanish electrical grid failure didn't end European commerce, but it did demonstrate how quickly localized failures can cascade through interconnected systems.

We're Breeding Grey Ducks Like Prize Livestock

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we're systematically creating Grey Duck scenarios through what Taleb calls "fragilism"—building systems that become more fragile as they become more efficient.

Consider your typical mid-size company today. Your email runs on Microsoft 365. Your customer data lives in Salesforce. Your website depends on AWS. Your payment processing runs through Stripe. Your internal communications happen on Slack. Your authentication flows through Okta. Your DNS is managed by CloudFlare.

Each of these choices made perfect sense individually. But collectively, you've created a house of cards where a problem at any single vendor can bring your entire operation to its knees. The three largest cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—account for approximately two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure market share, creating massive concentration risk that most organizations never consciously chose.

The kicker? Most organizations can't even visualize these dependencies, let alone plan for their failure. Ask your IT team what happens if Microsoft 365 goes down for three days. Watch them turn pale. Ask what happens if AWS has a multi-region failure. Watch them reach for their resumé.

This isn't about the vendors being bad—Microsoft, AWS, and Salesforce are remarkably reliable. It's about the interconnectedness creating systemic vulnerabilities that nobody designed for and few people understand.

When Grey Ducks Flock Together

Here's where it gets really interesting: multiple Grey Duck events can cascade into something that looks like a Black Swan. Imagine this scenario:

A solar flare disrupts satellite communications (Grey Duck #1). This affects GPS timing, which disrupts high-frequency trading (Grey Duck #2). Market volatility triggers automated sell-offs (Grey Duck #3). A major bank's trading algorithms malfunction, freezing credit markets (Grey Duck #4). Supply chain financing dries up, affecting global logistics (Grey Duck #5).

Each individual event is manageable. Together, they create a systemic crisis that feels unpredictable but was actually composed of entirely predictable components. This is exactly what happened during the recent Spanish electrical grid failure in April 2025—individual system failures cascaded through interconnected infrastructure until 60% of Spain's power was lost in seconds, demonstrating how technical errors and poor planning can create nationwide disruptions.

The Cybersecurity Grey Duck Zoo

The cybersecurity world is particularly rich with Grey Duck scenarios:

• The Authentication Apocalypse: What happens when your single sign-on provider has a bad day? Most organizations have no idea because they've never tested it. Yet Okta, Microsoft, and Google all have regular service disruptions.
• The Cloud Concentration Crisis: The three largest cloud providers host approximately two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure. When one has a regional failure, thousands of "unrelated" services fail simultaneously. It's predictable, preparable, and almost never prepared for.
• The Software Supply Chain Shuffle: Modern applications depend on hundreds of third-party components. When one gets compromised (like SolarWinds or MOVEit), the blast radius is enormous but entirely bounded to organizations using that specific component.
• The Vendor Vanishing Act: What happens when a critical SaaS provider gets acquired, goes bankrupt, or decides to change their business model? Most organizations have no transition plan because they've never imagined it happening.

These aren't sophisticated attacks by nation-states. They're business failures, operational mistakes, and market changes that happen with predictable frequency but unpredictable timing.

Building Grey Duck Resilience (Without Going Insane)

The good news? Grey Duck events are preparable. The bad news? Most organizations are terrible at this kind of preparation because it requires thinking about boring failure modes rather than exciting attack scenarios.

• Map Your Dependencies (The Scary Part): Most organizations have no idea how interconnected their systems are. Start with a simple exercise: list every service that, if it failed for 72 hours, would materially impact your business. Then list every service those services depend on. Congratulations, you've just discovered your Grey Duck attack surface.
• Design for Graceful Degradation: Instead of trying to prevent every failure, design systems that can limp along when things break. Can your sales team still take orders if Salesforce is down? Can your website still function if your CDN fails? Can your team still communicate if Slack disappears?
• Practice the Boring Stuff: Nobody wants to run a tabletop exercise for "what if our email provider has a three-day outage." But that's exactly what you need to practice. Grey Duck preparation isn't about dramatic incident response—it's about mundane continuity planning.
• Create Circuit Breakers: Build automatic systems that isolate failing components before they cascade. This might mean backup authentication methods, alternative payment processors, or offline operational procedures.

The Competitive Advantage of Grey Duck Thinking

Here's what makes Grey Duck preparation different from traditional risk management: it can actually create competitive advantage.

When the 2021 Suez Canal blockage happened, companies with diversified supply chains didn't just survive—they gained market share from competitors who couldn't deliver. When regional cloud outages occur, organizations with multi-cloud architectures keep serving customers while competitors post "we're experiencing technical difficulties" messages.

This is the key insight: Grey Duck resilience isn't just about avoiding downside risk. It's about being the organization that keeps operating when everyone else is down.

The Choice: Fragile or Antifragile?

We're at an inflection point. The modern business ecosystem is becoming more interconnected every year. Cloud adoption is accelerating. SaaS proliferation continues. The vendor networks we depend on are becoming more complex and less visible.

We can either acknowledge this reality and build intelligent resilience, or we can continue pretending that vendor failures are unpredictable Black Swans and act surprised when they happen.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade aren't those that avoid all dependencies—that's impossible in a connected world. They're the ones that understand their dependencies, plan for their failures, and turn Grey Duck events into competitive advantages.

Because in a world where everyone depends on the same critical infrastructure, the question isn't whether you'll face a Grey Duck event—it's whether you'll be prepared to keep flying when everyone else is grounded.

What Grey Duck scenarios keep you awake at night? How many dependencies could you actually map right now? Share your thoughts—because the first step to Grey Duck resilience is admitting we all have a problem.

#RiskManagement #BusinessResilience #VendorRisk #Cybersecurity #SystemicRisk #BusinessStrategy #ThirdPartyRisk #GreyDuck