The chaos seems to have passed and the computing world is slowly recovering... but it's impossible to deny that CrowdStrike gave us a big shake. Its CEO publicly apologized and others spent the weekend calculating losses. However, today we have Microsoft's word, which shared its own numbers: The best assessment from Redmond indicates that 8.5 million devices were affected, equivalent to "less than 1 percent" of all Windows systems...
This is not the first time something like this has happened. If we cast our minds back, AVG had a similar problem in November 2008, when its antivirus deleted the user32.dll file on Windows XP installations. A year and a half later, McAfee made the same mistake with the svchost.exe file. An extra fact? George Kurtz, current CEO of CrowdStrike, was CTO of McAfee at that time.
The point is that it all feels like a house of cards, with Jesus Christ as the architect, and the whole world praying that no one sneezes. There will be another CrowdStrike in the future, but the real question is whether we learned anything from this one. For now, we're still processing information, and the latest morsel comes via Microsoft, which took several shrapnel impacts.
CrowdStrike: 8.5 million systems affected, according to Microsoft
In a post on its official blog, the Redmond giant not only described its steps to assist customers and open collaboration channels (including Google, Amazon, and of course CrowdStrike), but also put a number to the incident: 8.5 million Windows devices, according to its latest calculations. In the grand Windows universe, that's less than 1 percent.
Yes, the percentage is small, but Microsoft highlights that "the economic and social impact reflects the use of CrowdStrike by many companies that maintain critical services". It also talks about "learn, recover, and move forward", and shares the official CrowdStrike instructions for fixing the error and restoring affected systems.
On a personal note, I'm more worried than before. If "only" 8.5 million systems were affected, I'm terrified of the possibility of an event that adds a zero to that number. What comes next? Obviously, the legal phase: losses amount to billions of dollars, and insurance claims are starting to pile up.
Source: Microsoft official blog
