A global tech outage that was related to a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, Microsoft said at the weekend.

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

A software update by CrowdStrike triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or 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.

CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix, Microsoft said, adding that it was working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, sharing information about the effects Microsoft was seeing across the industry.

The air travel industry was recovering on Saturday from the outage that caused thousands of flights to be cancelled, leaving passengers stranded or grappling with hours of delays as airports and airlines were caught up in the IT outage.

Delta Air Lines, one of the hardest-hit airlines, said that as of 10am EDT (4pm SAST) on Saturday, more than 600 flights had been cancelled, adding that additional cancellations were expected. — Jahnavi Nidumolu and Gnaneshwar Rajan, (c) 2024 Reuters