Microsoft Says 8.5-M Of Its Devices Hit By CrowdStrike Outage

A global tech outage related to a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, the company said in a recent blog post, Reuters reported.

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off the air, and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking. I Photo: reivax Wikimedia Commons

"We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines," it said in the blog.

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, one of the largest operators in the industry, triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off the air, and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.

"While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services," Microsoft said in its blog post.

CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution that will help Microsoft's Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix, Microsoft said, adding that it was working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, sharing information about the effects Microsoft was seeing across the industry.