Tech outage subsides following extensive disruption

A software update by Crowdstrike, a global leader in cybersecurity, prompted a far-flung tech outage globally that impacted close to 8.5 million Microsoft devices, according to a Saturday blog post by Microsoft.

"We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one per cent of all Windows machines," it said in the blog.

This update took out broad swathes of systems, grounding flights and knocking broadcasters off the air—leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without services such as health care and 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 since worked with Microsoft on a fix and is engineering a solution that will fast-track it through Microsoft's Azure infrastructure, adding that it was collaborating with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, sharing information about the effects Microsoft was seeing across the industry.

Of all the sectors, air travel was worst affected, because the failure in systems forced the cancellation of thousands of flights and caused major delays to flights scheduled to take off, leaving passengers stranded at various locations. In this connection, Delta Air Lines, one of the most affected airlines, said over 600 flights had been cancelled by 10 a.m. EDT on Saturday, and more were expected.

This CrowdStrike software update has resulted in widespread disruption, leaving very little doubt as to how interdependent global digital infrastructure really is today. As enterprises and service providers work toward restoring normalcy, this incident presents a stark reminder of the far-reaching consequences that cybersecurity vulnerabilities can cause.