CrowdStrike outage hits 8.5 million Microsoft devices

The disrupted services included airlines, broadcasters, and critical sectors such as healthcare and banking.
Windows outage

According to a blog post from Microsoft on Saturday, a global tech outage caused by a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices. That number represents less than one percent of all Windows machines, but the impact was significant, grounding flights, interrupting broadcasts, and disrupting access to essential services such as healthcare and banking.

Despite the relatively small percentage of devices affected, the outage had broad economic and societal effects due to critical enterprises’ widespread use of CrowdStrike’s services. Microsoft noted that CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution to accelerate the fix for Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure. The company is also collaborating with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to share information about the outage’s effects across the industry.

The air travel industry was particularly hard hit, with thousands of flights cancelled and passengers experiencing extensive delays. Delta Air Lines, one of the hardest-hit airlines, reported over 600 flight cancellations by Saturday morning, with more expected throughout the day as the industry worked to recover from the IT outage.