Microsoft says about 8.5M of its devices affected by outage

A MASSIVE global tech outage that was related to a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike impacted nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, the company said in a blog post on Saturday. “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” it said in the blog.

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, one of the largest operators in the industry, triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as health care or banking.

“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Microsoft said in its blog post.

CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix, Microsoft said, adding that it was working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform, sharing information about the effects Microsoft was seeing across the industry.

The air travel industry was recovering on Saturday from the outage that caused thousands of flights to be canceled, leaving passengers stranded or grappling with hours of delays as airports and airlines were caught up in the IT outage.

Delta Airlines, one of the hardest-hit airlines, said that as of 10 a.m EDT (2 p.m. GMT) on Saturday, more than 600 flights had been canceled, adding that additional cancellations were expected.