Computer outage affected 8.5 million devices

The outage was caused by a CrowdStrike software update that was found to be incompatible with the world’s most popular Windows operating system.

“While the percentage was small, the significant economic and social impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by companies that manage many vital services,” Microsoft added.

Due to the CrowdStrike software failure that spread around the world, thousands of flights at airports had to be cancelled and the operation of numerous hospitals, state agencies, factories and television channels, among others, was interrupted.

Microsoft Vice President David Weston said in a blog post that the incident was “outside the scope” of his company. He detailed the steps his company had taken, including deploying hundreds of engineers and experts to help organizations affected by the virtual blackout.

“CrowdStrike helped us develop a large-scale deployable solution that will enable Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure (cloud service, editor’s note) to accelerate the correction of the faulty update,” he said.

Microsoft, the world’s number two in cloud technology behind Amazon and ahead of Google, also says it has worked with its two main competitors to share information about 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,” said David Weston.