The world experienced one of, if not the biggest IT outage in history over the weekend, as independent cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rolled out a faulty driver update that caused millions of Windows PCs to be hit with the dreaded blue screen of death.

The IT outage affected numerous facets of society, including emergency services, hospitals, airlines, supermarkets, payment systems, telecommunications companies, stock exchanges, and more. The problem was traced back to a faulty driver that was pushed out by CrowdStrike, and since the issue resulted in affected PCs entering boot loops the fix has to be performed manually, which poses a real issue to businesses and companies that heavily rely on multiple Windows PCs.
Microsoft has now taken to its blog to recognize the outage, writing that while it wasn't the outage isn't the company's fault, it's working with CrowdStrike to remedy the situation for affected customers.
The blog post revealed the first official mention of how many Windows PCs were affected by the faulty driver. According to Microsoft, that number is less than 1% of all Windows machines, or more specifically 8.5 million.
"While software updates may occasionally cause disturbances, significant incidents like the CrowdStrike event are infrequent. We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent 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," wrote David Weston - Vice President, Enterprise and OS Security
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