Microsoft says CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices

A day after one of the biggest IT outages affected several sectors and crippled services across the world, Microsoft on Saturday said that a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices.

“While software updates may occasionally cause disturbances, significant incidents like the CrowdStrike event are infrequent. We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” said Microsoft in a blog.

Microsoft further added that while the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.

The tech giant said that they are working around the clock and providing ongoing updates and support.

“Additionally, CrowdStrike has helped us develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike’s faulty update. We have also worked with both AWS and GCP to collaborate on the most effective approaches.”

We recognize the disruption this problem has caused for businesses and in the daily routines of many individuals, said Microsoft, adding, “Our focus is providing customers with technical guidance and support to safely bring disrupted systems back online. Steps taken have included.”

Meanwhile, CrowdStrike also issued a statement and said that they understand how this issue occurred and they are doing a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic flaw occurred.

“This effort will be ongoing. We are committed to identifying any foundational or workflow improvements that we can make to strengthen our process. We will update our findings in the root cause analysis as the investigation progresses,” CrowdStrike said in a blog.

On Friday, CrowdStrike said that they understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.