Microsoft says over 8m Windows devices crashed amid global IT outage

Microsoft says less than 1% of all Windows machines around the world were affected by the global IT outage

Tech Desk - Jul 21, 2024

An undated image of a Windows key. — Pexels

If you happen to be someone who even rarely indulges in technology-related developments that occur around the world, you must not be a novice to the global IT outage triggered by a faulty update released by CrowdStrike on Friday.

Besides prompting the biggest IT disaster in years, Microsoft said that the CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices.

The company also stated in its official blog that even though that number is “less than 1% of all Windows machines,” it was sufficient to bring plenty of complications for retailers, banks, airlines, and various other industries that heavily rely on Windows devices.

On the other hand, CrowdStrike's official blog regarding the worldwide IT failure details a varying account of what happened and why millions of Windows devices were affected simultaneously.

Other chunks extracted from the CrowdStrike blog contain the following as to what really happened: "On July 19, 2024, at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems."

"Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems", stated the blog.

When and which devices were affected by CrowdStrike's latest update

As per the company, the devices that were most likely to crash were those running Falcon sensors for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration between 04:09 UTC and 05:27 UTC.