Microsoft Outage CausesRs 75,000 Crore Wealth Wipeout Of Crowdstrike

The shares of CrowdStrike, a US-based cybersecurity firm, fell by 11 per cent on Friday, July 19. The company lost over $9 million (₹75,300 crore approx.) of its market value due to the global tech outage that crashed Microsoft's computer systems, reported Bloomberg. 

The report added that even after the drop CrowdStrike's total worth stands at $74 billion. 

CrowdStrike's software update had affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, the company said in a blog post on Saturday.

"We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices or less than one per cent of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services," it said in the blog.

The update, which was supposed to make systems more secure against hacking, had brought the world to a standstill. From grounded flights to broadcasters going off-air, the global crash had affected the daily proceedings like never before. People were also facing issues in the healthcare and banking sectors.

While Crowdstrike had rolled out a fix for the affected systems, experts weren't convinced, reported news agency Reuters. Some claimed that the issue would take more than usual since the codes needed manual interference. 

Steve Cobb, chief security officer at Security Scorecard, was quoted as saying,  "What it looks like is, potentially, the vetting or the sandboxing they do when they look at code, maybe somehow this file was not included in that or slipped through.”

Meanwhile, talking about the fix provided by Crowdstrike, Microsoft said, “We're working around the clock and providing ongoing updates and support. Additionally, CrowdStrike has helped us develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft's Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike's faulty update. We have also worked with both AWS and GCP to collaborate on the most effective approaches.”