If you’re somehow out of the loop in the last weekend, here’s a quick rundown: one faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike has took down major infrastructures across the world, including several airlines, rail services, banking institutions, cloud providers, TV networks, and many more. Several organizations in Malaysia was struck by the update, which has since caused major service disruptions.
But just how much chaos has been caused by one bad update? According to Microsoft, 8.5 million PCs and devices were hit, or less than 1% of all Windows machines worldwide.
CrowdStrike Update “Not A Microsoft Incident”
The software giant has first made it clear in its blog post that this global incident, which is said to be one of the worst in history, was “not a Microsoft incident” as the erroneous update was provided by CrowdStrike for its software. Hence, machines that either run non-Windows operating systems with CrowdStrike deployed, or Windows systems that use other EDRs, are not affected by this incident.
On that note, both TM and CelcomDigi has released statements detailing the impacts of recent CrowdStrike-related outage. On TM’s part, it reported “no disruption” on its business operations and services; whereas CelcomDigi reported limited impact on “support services”, such as reload capabilities. The service has since been recovered via workarounds by its service recovery teams.
While Microsoft cited less than 1% of affected machines worldwide, these 8.5 million systems are responsible for some of the most critical infrastructures on the planet, so the impact is certainly a lot more severe than the number may initially suggest. Still, the company assures that restoration is ongoing with “hundreds” of its engineers dispatched to assist in recovery efforts.
Pokdepinion: Certainly a hard lesson learned on the importance of software redundancy and stability.
