Around 8.5 million Windows devices affected by CrowdStrike outage

Facing widespread criticism for the global tech outage on Friday, Microsoft said that about 8.5 million Windows devices machines were affected. The tech major said it has deployed hundreds of engineers to bring systems back to normal.

“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines. 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 a blog post.

Last week, a simple update conducted by Microsoft’s cybersecurity partner, CrowdStrike impacted IT systems globally including India where several businesses and individuals reported that their Windows devices had crashed and were unable to reboot. 

This was one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years, knocking out banks, airlines and businesses globally. I

• Also read: Global disruption: Microsoft outage grounds flights, hits banks

The CrowdStrike outage reveals the dangers of centralized tech ecosystems particularly on tech infrastructure of critical services like banks and aviation. While the US, Europe and parts of South Asia reported severe disruptions to critical services as a result of the outage.

According to reports, China’s infrastructure remained largely unaffected by this incident. According to their websites, airports in Beijing and Shanghai were functioning normally even after the outage, while the state of the art infrastructure in the United States and Europe was crippled because of the outage.

This is because China has made active efforts to reduce reliance on third party service providers, using local solutions to provide cyber security.

“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem — global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers. It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist,” – Microsoft said in its blog post. 

Experts also believe that it is time for corporations to rethink their strategy on cybersecurity.  Siddharth Vishwanath, Advisory Markets Leader at PWC explained, “while this was a one time or a rare incident, it reveals new types of risks to corporates when it comes to cybersecurity.

In light of this, corporations will have to rethink their cybersecurity strategy.” CrowdStrike inhabits an undisputed monopoly in the cybersecurity space. According to CrowdStrike’s own website, it provides cybersecurity services to 538 of the top Fortune 1000 companies. Vishwanath explains that these numbers will be similar in India where 60-65 of BSE top 100 will be using CrowdStrike to provide endpoint cybersecurity. 

“The CrowdStrike incident reveals how corporate computing is standardized for efficiency at the cost of resilience. Microsoft is the go-to operating system for nearly all corporate functions, and the cybersecurity market is inhabited by only 4-5 serious players.

“Make in India is a phrase which has a lot of political expediency, it will be wise for Indian policymakers to  direct some of these make in India efforts to make our tech infrastructure resilient in an ever interconnected world,” and expert told businessline.