Microsoft reports 8.5 millon windows devices affected by CrowdStrike outage

Around 8.5 million Windows devices globally were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage, according to a Microsoft blog post by David Weston, the company’s vice president of enterprise and OS security.

These are the first real numbers released by either Microsoft or CrowdStrike regarding the scale of Friday’s outage, which was caused by an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software that led Windows machines to crash.

Mac and Linux devices were not affected.

Although the number of affected devices was relatively low—less than one percent of Windows machines worldwide—the impact was widespread, affecting banks, retailers, brokerage companies, rail networks, and more, according to TechCrunch.

Airlines halted flight operations around the world.

“While the percentage of affected devices was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Weston wrote.

He did not specify what percentage of Windows devices with CrowdStrike software were affected.

Weston noted that even a single crashed computer could potentially take down an entire network or datacenter.

Although this was not a Microsoft incident, the company had been working with CrowdStrike to address the issue.

Systems may be slow to recover if every affected computer requires a manual fix, but Weston said Microsoft and CrowdStrike have developed “a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix” and are also collaborating with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

WARNING! All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express permission from ZAMBIA MONITOR.