A global technology outage linked to a software update by cybersecurity firm Crown Strike Opens a New Tab affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft companies, Microsoft said in a blog post on Saturday.
“We currently estimate that the Crown Strike update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows devices,” she said in the blog.
A software update by global cybersecurity firm Crown Strike, one of the industry's largest operators, created systems issues that grounded flights, forced broadcasters to stop broadcasting and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.
“Although the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of Crown Strike by companies managing many critical services,” Microsoft said in its blog.
Microsoft said CrownStrike helped develop a solution that will help Microsoft's Azure infrastructure accelerate the remediation process, adding that it is working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, to share information about the impacts Microsoft is seeing across the industry.
The air travel industry was recovering Saturday from an outage that caused thousands of flights to be canceled, leaving passengers stranded or grappling with hours of delays as airports and airlines were caught in IT outages.
Delta Air Lines, one of the most affected airlines, said that as of 10 a.m. EST on Saturday, more than 600 flights had been cancelled, adding that more flights were expected to be cancelled.
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