Microsoft said 8.5 million devices running its Windows operating system were affected by the faulty cybersecurity update Friday that led to worldwide disruptions. That’s less than 1% of all Windows-based devices, Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston said in a blog post Saturday.
Microsoft said in a blog post:
While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.
The company notes that software updates “sometimes cause disruptions,” but admits that this scale is a rare occurrence.
The US corporation pointed out that the incident is not directly related to Microsoft’s work, as the failure occurred due to the CrowdStrike software update. However, the corporation was working to fix the problem as it concerned its ecosystem.
On Friday, Windows-powered computers from multiple companies around the world stopped booting. The cause was a flaw in one of the software updates from CrowdStrike.
At the same time, Microsoft reported availability issues with a number of its cloud services, including Microsoft Teams messenger, Microsoft Defender antivirus and Microsoft 365 components, due to a reconfiguration of its Azure cloud service. The disruption caused delays to thousands of flights around the world, with problems at stock exchanges, banks, hospitals and TV channels. Russia was virtually unaffected by the outage.
