David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president of enterprise and operating system security, wrote that approximately 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage.
“While software updates can occasionally cause disruptions, major incidents like the CrowdStrike incident are uncommon. We currently estimate that the CrowdStrike update impacted 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines. While this is a small percentage, the broad economic and societal impact reflects CrowdStrike’s use by enterprises running many critical services.”
However, he did not disclose the percentage of Windows devices with CrowdStrike software installed that was affected. Although the number of affected devices is relatively small, the damage was widespread and spread across the world, affecting industries such as banks, retailers, brokerage firms, and railway networks.
Weston said the company has been working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue and has developed a scalable solution that helps Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure speed up the fixes for CrowdStrike’s buggy updates. At the same time, they are also working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to jointly find the most effective approach.
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem of global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers. It also reminds us how important it is for everyone across the technology ecosystem to prioritize secure deployments and disaster recovery using existing mechanisms.”
