(San Francisco) The global computer outage that disrupted airports, banks and many other services Friday affected 8.5 million Windows computers, Microsoft said in a blog post Saturday.
“We currently estimate that the CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines,” the cloud computing giant said.
The outage was caused by an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software that was found to be incompatible with the world’s most popular Windows operating system.
“While the percentage is small, the significant economic and societal impacts observed reflect the use of CrowdStrike by companies that manage many critical services,” Microsoft continued.
Several thousand flights have been cancelled, while the operation of many hospitals, administrations, factories and television channels, among others, has been disrupted.
David Weston, a corporate vice president of IT, insists in the blog post that the incident is “not Microsoft’s fault.”
He details the measures his company has taken, such as deploying hundreds of engineers and experts to help organizations affected by the outage.
CrowdStrike helped us develop a widely deployable solution that will enable Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure to accelerate the remediation of the flawed update
Excerpt from the blog post by David Weston, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft
Microsoft, the world’s second largest cloud computing company behind Amazon and ahead of Google, also said it had worked with its two main competitors to share information on the impact of the problem on their industry.
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our vast ecosystem – global cloud providers, software, cybersecurity companies and other software vendors, and customers,” Weston said.
Many experts stressed as early as Friday that the scale of the outage revealed the risks associated with consolidation in the cybersecurity and security sectors. cloud : in case of a bug, millions of computers are instantly affected.