New Understanding of Explosive Percolation

This month, United Airlines grounded nearly 5,000 flights when its computer system crashed. The culprit? A faulty network router. Later on the same morning, another computer glitch halted trading on the New York Stock Exchange for over three hours. Some saw the sinister hand of a hacker in these outages, but they are far more likely to be a coincidence, an intrinsic feature of the system rather than a bug. Researchers have discovered that connectivity might emerge with a bang, not a whimper, via a phenomenon they have dubbed explosive percolation. This new understanding of how uber-connectivity emerges is the first step toward identifying warning signs that may occur when such systems go awry.