Microsoft says about 8.5 million devices affected by CrowdStrike-related outage

A Global Technology Disruption The incident was related to a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, Microsoft said in a blog post on Saturday (July 20).

“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update impacted 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows devices,” the company said in a blog post.

Global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, one of the largest operators in the industry, has released a software update that Caused system problems, resulting in flight cancellationsforcing broadcasters to go off the air and denying customers access to services such as health care or banking.

“While small, the broad economic and societal impact reflects CrowdStrike’s use by businesses running many critical services,” Microsoft said in its blog post.

Microsoft said CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution that helps Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure speed up remediation of issues, adding that it is working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to share information about the impact Microsoft is seeing across the industry.

The air travel industry was just recovering from a network outage on Saturday that caused thousands of flights to be canceled and passengers to be stranded or face hours of delays as airports and airlines were mired in IT glitches.

Delta Air Lines, one of the worst-hit airlines, said more than 600 flights had been canceled as of 10 a.m. ET (14:00 GMT) on Saturday, with more cancellations expected.