"Biggest IT Failure in History" Follow-up: Affects 8.5 million devices, will take several weeks to fix

Global Windows system crashes on Friday, requiring manual recovery one by one.

On July 19 local time, a software update from the American cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike triggered the "largest IT failure in history," causing millions of Windows systems to crash globally. This led to disruptions in normal operations across almost all industries, affecting global enterprises and users who were unable to access their systems.

According to media reports citing Adam Leon Smith, a member of the British Computer Society, the impact of the CrowdStrike incident "may take several days or even weeks to recover."

CrowdStrike officially explained that the massive system crash was caused by a failure in its Falcon sensor software update. Microsoft stated in a blog post on Saturday:

"Based on our current estimates, CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, which is less than 1% of the total global devices."

However, considering the widespread deployment of CrowdStrike security software globally, the impact of the incident is evidently more profound. For instance, 1848 flights worldwide have been canceled due to this incident, affecting regions including the United States, Australia, India, and Canada.

As of the end of 2023, CrowdStrike has over 29,000 enterprise customers, with its software reportedly used by over half of the Fortune 500 companies. Analyst Neil MacDonald from the IT consulting firm Gartner pointed out:

"Such a widely deployed security agent, which should protect devices, causing devices to crash, is unprecedented."

Currently, the only way to resolve this issue is to restart the computer and manually remove CrowdStrike's faulty file updates. This operation requires manual access to each device, which could take several days or even weeks to complete for large enterprises with thousands of Windows devices.

Citigroup analyst Fatima Boolani stated in a report:

"The scale and interconnectedness of this software vendor could potentially damage the global economic system with any mistake. This may attract more political and regulatory scrutiny."

Ian Batten, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham's School of Computer Science, pointed out that this IT incident could have been prevented through "a single pre-test," indicating that it seems like someone made "a bit of a coding mistake" this time