- A global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike update disrupted air travel, banking and television.
- Microsoft is 8.5 million Machines using Windows software I was influenced.
- Experts say the blackouts could cause billions of dollars in damages around the world and take weeks to resolve.
An update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a global IT outage on Friday, causing widespread disruptions to air travel, banking services and even television broadcasts.
Microsoft said Saturday that the outage affected less than 1% of machines using Windows software worldwide, or about 8.5 million machines.
In a blog post, Microsoft said the impact of the outage on businesses around the world reflected “CrowdStrike’s use by companies that run many critical services.”
Business Insider previously reported that the massive outage reflects the market dominance of Microsoft and CrowdStrike: Windows held roughly 72% of the global OS market share as of February, according to Statista data, while one estimate puts CrowdStrike’s market share in the “endpoint protection” security category at nearly 24%.
“This incident illustrates the interconnectedness of our broad ecosystem of global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors, other software vendors, and customers,” Microsoft wrote, “and serves as a reminder of how important it is for all of us across our technology ecosystem to use existing mechanisms to prioritize secure deployment and disaster recovery.”
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a flawed system update, causing one of the worst technology outages in history. The update specifically affected Windows software, CrowdStrike said Mac and Linux were not affected.
The ensuing confusion saw airlines and hotels use paper and pen to enter passenger information, medical services halted in some European hospitals, and pictures from airports and shops showed blue error screens on computers and flight information displays.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Friday that the issue has been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” which involves manually removing the file update on affected computers.
While the fix seems simple, experts told Business Insider that companies with fewer IT staff could take weeks to resolve the “blue screen” on all of their devices, meaning some industries could be affected for a while.
Andrew Peck, a cybersecurity expert at Britain’s Loughborough University, told CNN that fixing the problem could cost billions of dollars for several companies around the world.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
