CrowdStrike Says Significant Number Of Impacted Windows Devices Back In Operation; Stock Down

(RTTNews) - CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc., the cybersecurity firm behind the 'largest IT outage in history' is continuing with its downward stock movement, even after the firm informed that a significant number of the impacted Microsoft Windows devices are back online and operational. The faulty software update had knocked out around 8.5 million computers globally and resulted in chaos in many major sectors including airline operation.

In pre-market activity on the Nasdaq, CrowdStrike shares were losing around 5.2 percent to trade at $289.08. The issues, which started on late Thursday, had pushed down the company's stock price on Friday by 11.1 percent to close at $304.96.

CrowdStrike released a software update on August 18 that began impacting IT systems globally. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, in an earlier post on X platform, had stated that the outages were caused by a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The faulty software update had brought down computers and technical systems across the world unexpectedly, including airlines, banks, businesses, governments, schools, as well as health and emergency services, among others.

In many countries across the world, tens of thousands of customers and air and rail passengers were stranded due to their respective service providers' inability to operate due to the glitch.

Thousands of flights were cancelled worldwide so far since the outages. Many U.S. airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Frontier Airlines, among others, experienced issues.

The flights are still getting cancelled on the fourth day Monday even after the companies said they were solving the issues. According to the tracking website FlightAware, total cancellations on Monday so far are 1,151 flights, while total delays are 15,147. Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States are 785, while the delays are 1063.

Certain other companies also continue to experience delay in operations and other technical problems.

As per CrowdStrike's latest update, it tested a new technique to accelerate impacted system remediation, and continues to focus on restoring all systems as soon as possible.

"We're in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique. We're making progress by the minute," the company said.

Responding to the outage, CrowdStrike on Friday had said that the the issue had been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. The company added then that it was not a security incident or cyberattack, and that Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted.

According to earlier blog post from Microsoft, the outage affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices, 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, the company then noted.

Although this was not a Microsoft incident, the company said it took various steps to provide users with technical guidance and support citing it's impact in the ecosystem.

Microsoft further said, "This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem — global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers. It's also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist. As we've seen over the last two days, we learn, recover and move forward most effectively when we collaborate and work together."