- Worldwide IT outages caused by CrowdStrike updates disrupted air travel, banking, and TV.
- Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million machines that use Windows software affected.
- Experts say the blackout could cost billions of dollars worldwide and take weeks to resolve.
A worldwide IT outage on Friday caused by an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike resulted in widespread disruptions to air travel, banking services and even television broadcasts.
Microsoft announced Saturday that the outage affected less than 1% — or about 8.5 million — of machines running Windows software worldwide.
In a blog post, Microsoft said the outage’s impact on businesses around the world reflected “the use of CrowdStrike by companies running many mission-critical services.”
Business Insider previously reported that the massive outage also reflects Microsoft and CrowdStrike’s market dominance. Statista data shows that Windows held about 72% of the global operating system market share as of February, while one estimate puts CrowdStrike’s market share in the “endpoint protection” security category at nearly 24%.
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our vast ecosystem — global cloud providers, software platforms, security and other software vendors, and customers,” Microsoft wrote. “It is also a reminder of how critical it is for all of us across the technology ecosystem to prioritize operating with secure deployments and disaster recovery using existing mechanisms.”
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty system update, resulting in the most widespread technology outage in history. The update specifically affected Windows software, while machines running CrowdStrike announced that Mac and Linux are not affected.
The chaos has seen airlines and hotels resort to pen and paper to record patient information and medical services have been canceled at some European hospitals. Photos from airports and shops showed blue error screens on computers and flight information displays.
On Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the issue had been “identified, isolated, and a fix has been applied.” The fix includes manually deleting the update file on affected computers.
While the fix may seem simple, experts told Business Insider that companies with fewer IT personnel could take weeks to resolve the “blue screen of death” on every device, meaning some industries could feel the impact for a while.
Andrew Peck, a cybersecurity expert at Loughborough University in the UK, told CNN that fixing the problem at companies around the world could cost billions.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
