Microsoft low-balled the impact of the Windows outage

Microsoft's latest update on the CrowdStrike outage may have revealed the company low-balled its initial estimation of the total affected machines.

Microsoft low-balled the impact of the Windows outage
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Tech and Science Editor
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Microsoft has provided another update on the fallout of the CrowdStrike outage that knocked out an initially estimated 8.5 million Windows machines around the globe.

Microsoft low-balled the impact of the Windows outage 615416565

The outage affected numerous facets of infrastructure globally, as affected machines were mostly used by big businesses such as airlines, telecommunications companies, banks, stock exchanges, and more. The first revenue loss estimates of the outage approximated a $5.4 billion loss for affected companies in the Fortune 500.

Microsoft initially stated in a blog post that CrowdStrike's outage was caused by a faulty driver update for the company's cybersecurity Falcon Sensor software that triggered kernel errors, and that it estimated 8.5 million Windows machines were affected.

However, that may not be the total number of affected machines, as Microsoft gave an update about the process of its initial assessment. In a recent blog post, David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, explained the company measured the impact of the incident through crash reports, and not every Windows customer has opted in to crash reports.

"It's worth noting the number of devices which generated crash reports is a subset of the number of impacted devices previously shared by Microsoft in our blog post, because crash reports are sampled and collected only from customers who choose to upload their crashes to Microsoft. Customers who choose to enable crash dump sharing help both driver vendors and Microsoft to identify and remediate quality issues and crashes," reads the blog post

When the CrowdStrike turmoil was unfolding, I spoke to Prof. Ahmed Banafa, Tech Expert and Engineering professor at San Jose State University, who specializes in IoT, blockchain, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.

I asked Banafa if Microsoft's initial estimation of 8.5 million Windows machines was accurate, to which he said that it "appears to be relatively small based on the global impact observed" and that Microsoft stated in its blog post less than 1% of total Windows installations were affected, which would be "15 million roughly" as there are approximately 1.5 billion installations of Windows.

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Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100s of new tech products and kept us informed daily on the latest science, space, and artificial intelligence news. Jak's love for science, space, and technology, and, more specifically, PC gaming, began at 10 years old. It was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms.

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