A flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. has affected 8.5 million devices worldwide that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Microsoft Corp. presented the full scope of the worldwide IT outage for the first time in Blog Microsoft said Saturday that the affected devices represented less than 1 percent of all Windows devices. “While the percentage is small, the economic and social impacts are broad,” the Redmond, Washington-based company said.
In what will become the biggest IT disaster to fail The world has never seen anything like it before. The CrowdStrike update brought businesses and governments around the world to a standstill, paralyzing operations for hours. Emergency response lines were disrupted. Thousands of flights were delayed and canceled. Hospitals were forced to delay procedures, and trade across marketplaces slowed.
In an attempt to explain how another company’s software update could have crashed Windows systems, Ann Johnson, Microsoft’s vice president of information security, used the analogy of a driver filling up a car with gas.
“If you have a car, and you take it to the gas station and you get bad or spoiled fuel, your car won’t run properly,” Johnson said in an interview Friday. “The fuel gets all over the engine system, and it affects performance. It can affect the car as a whole.”
Similarly, Johnson said, “CrowdStrike lives in a layer inside Microsoft Windows” to provide “maximum security. They live in a layer that really impacts the entire Windows infrastructure if they make a mistake.”