According to a Microsoft blog post by David Weston, the company’s vice president of enterprise and OS security, approximately 8.5 million devices were impacted by the recent CrowdStrike outage. This figure represents less than 1 percent of Windows machines worldwide.
These numbers are the first official estimates from either Microsoft or CrowdStrike regarding the extent of the outage. The issue was triggered by an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, which caused Windows machines to crash. Notably, Mac and Linux devices were unaffected.
Despite the relatively low percentage of affected devices, the disruption was significant and far-reaching, impacting banks, retailers, brokerage firms, rail networks, and more. Airlines around the globe had to halt flight operations.
“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 noted in his post.
Weston did not specify what percentage of Windows devices running CrowdStrike software were affected. However, even a single computer crash could potentially disrupt an entire network or data center.
He also mentioned that although the incident was not caused by Microsoft, the company has been collaborating with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue. Systems recovery may be slow if each affected computer requires a manual fix, but Weston indicated that Microsoft and CrowdStrike have developed a scalable solution to expedite the recovery of Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure. They are also working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to address the problem.
