CrowdStrike IT outage: Microsoft says 8.5 million of its devices affected

A Windows-based supermarket self-service kiosk suffers the "blue screen of death" during the IT outage caused by a buggy update to CrowdStrike's security software. Photo / Herald staff

Cyber security experts warn malicious actors are trying to exploit the global tech outage which has affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices.

As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cyber security firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain.

Government cyber security agencies across the globe and even CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage.

”We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement.

”I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.”

The UK Cyber Security Centre said it has noticed an increase in phishing attempts around this event.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has confirmed nearly 8.5 million of its devices were affected.

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

Mmm. Yup. But your bank, airline and supermarket are in that 1% https://t.co/jbmcv80bym

— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) July 21, 2024

The outage triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.

Read an update on what we’ve done to help Microsoft customers recover from the recent CrowdStrike outage. Learn about our actions from the start of the incident and our collaboration with customers, cloud providers and others in the tech community. https://t.co/7lS3zl32ww

— Microsoft News and Stories (@MSFTnews) July 20, 2024

″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 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 Platform, 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 on Saturday that more than 600 flights had been cancelled, adding that additional cancellations were expected.