Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday and caused global disruptions are back up and running, as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong
AUSTIN, Texas — Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday and caused global disruptions are back up and running, as customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
A faulty software update that CrowdStrike sent to its customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical services on Friday, affecting some 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The painstaking work to fix it often required a company’s IT crew to manually delete files on the affected machines.
CrowdStrike said in a blog post late Sunday night that it had begun implementing a new technique to speed up the resolution of the problem.
Shares of the Texas cybersecurity company have fallen nearly 30% since the crisis, wiping out billions of dollars in market value.
The scale of the disruptions has also attracted the attention of government regulators, including anti-monopoly authorities, but it remains to be seen whether they will take action against the company.
“Today, a single outage too often results in a system-wide failure, affecting industries such as health care, airlines, banks and auto dealerships,” said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in a post Sunday on the social media platform X. “Millions of people and businesses are paying the price. These incidents show how concentration can create vulnerable systems.”