Flight Canceled Last Week? Here’s Why and How Much the Tech Outage Cost Businesses
By Movieguide® Contributor
After the CrowdStrike bug that crashed millions of computers on July 19, early predictions have found that the resultant outages could amount to a total of $5.4 billion lost by affected businesses.
The outage occurred when a buggy version of CrowdStrike’s premiere cybersecurity software, Falcon, was released to the public. Because many systems are set up to automatically download updates, the code, which crashed any computer running on Windows, was downloaded onto roughly 8.4 million computers even though CrowdStrike removed the update less than 2 hours later.
The subsequent outages were particularly difficult to manage because IT professionals were required to be physically present with the computers to remove the bug by hand, rather than fixing the issue remotely.
Initial insurance reports are now estimating that the bug will cost affected companies upwards of $5.4 billion in total. The most affected industries were banking and healthcare, which lost an estimated $1.94 billion and $1.15 billion respectively, followed by airlines which lost $860 million. Companies affected will likely only be able to recover 10-20% of the damages through cybersecurity insurance policies.
While CrowdStrike claims it has internal procedures in place to test updates before they are released to the public, how a bug this catastrophic could have gone unseen remains unclear. Other security experts, however, explain that companies like CrowdStrike release multiple updates a week, revealing why the company would be unable to conduct thorough testing before releasing new software.
Vowing to learn from this mistake, CrowdStrike announced it will be improving its update verification system to prevent an outage like this from ever happening again. The company also plans to introduce a staggered updating system, so not everyone receives new software at once, and also provide users with more fine-tuned control over when their devices download new updates.
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