Microsoft has shared a report on the Windows server crisis caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. It has the first data on the faulty software update that disabled hundreds of Windows systems. According to Microsoft, around 8.5 million devices experienced the CrowdStrike update issue.
CrowdStrike crisis crashes 8.5 million Windows devices
Affected Windows users reported getting blue screen errors on computers and servers. The outages related to the update disrupted the operations of many companies, from airlines to banking.
CrowdStrike was only supposed to be installed on corporate systems with automatic updates enabled. But Microsoft said the update covers Windows versions going back to Windows 7. It even affected devices with automatic updates disabled.
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Microsoft stated that the problem was caused by CrowdStrike. Accordingly, it said there was a misconfiguration file in one of the daily updates. This file forced systems to access the wrong memory address, causing a blue screen error.
Microsoft confirmed that 8.5 million devices experienced the outage. But this accounted for less than 1 percent of all Windows devices. Therefore, it said the scale of the outage was not too large thanks to Windows’ market share.
The financial cost of the CrowdStrike bug is not yet clear. But following the news of the worldwide outage, the company’s share price fell 11 percent and its market capitalization dropped to $74 billion.
