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The flawed update from cybersecurity software company CrowdStrike has affected 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft said in a post Saturday detailing its ongoing response to the extraordinary global IT outage.
That number amounts to less than 1 percent of all Windows machines, according to the company. But despite the relatively small percentage, “the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Microsoft said in its post.
CrowdStrike previously outlined a fix for the issue, which involves booting Windows machines in safe mode and deleting the file associated with the faulty update.
Airlines and others were continuing to recover from the outage Saturday morning. United Airlines, for example, said customers may continue to experience delays and disruptions as it brings systems back online.
In its post Saturday morning, Microsoft said it has deployed hundreds of engineers and experts to help customers recover, “working around the clock and providing ongoing updates and support.”
The company said CrowdStrike helped to develop “a scalable solution” to accelerate a fix for versions of Windows on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Microsoft said it’s also collaborating with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which let customers run Windows instances on their cloud platforms.
CrowdStrike published new technical details about the root cause of the problem Saturday morning, saying that a sensor configuration update in its Falcon cybersecurity platform “triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems.”
As documented earlier, Microsoft faced undue criticism following the outage, because of the high visibility of impacted Windows machines. The company has been seeking to make it clear that the root cause of the issue was CrowdStrike’s update, not Microsoft’s operating system.
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem — global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers,” Microsoft said in its post. “It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist.”
