Crowdstrike outage: many companies ceased operations

A faulty update from IT security company Crowdstrike paralyzed around 8.5 million computers in July. The glitch had a significant impact, a survey shows.

Following the IT breach at the software company Crowdstrike in July, almost three quarters of the companies affected described the impact as serious for the German economy. This is the result of a non-representative survey conducted by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the digital association Bitkom among 331 companies affected by the outage.

62 percent of the companies affected at the time suffered direct consequences such as the failure of their own PCs or servers, according to a statement. 48 percent felt indirect effects, for example because suppliers, customers or business partners were affected.

Almost half of the companies had to cease operations

“Just under half of the companies directly or indirectly affected had to temporarily shut down operations – for an average of ten hours”, according to the BSI. With regard to their own company, two thirds were certain that such an incident could not be completely prevented.

BSI President Claudia Plattner called on companies to take precautionary measures in order to become more resistant to IT security incidents. “To this end, it is important to give users the greatest possible control over update processes,” she explained. Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst described the failures as a “warning shot”. “We urgently need to further improve our cybersecurity and need appropriate in-house expertise in companies and authorities,” he explained.

On July 19, a faulty update to a cyber security solution from the US software company Crowdstrike led to numerous IT failures worldwide. According to estimates by Windows developer Microsoft, around 8.5 million computers were affected. The consequences were felt particularly strongly in air traffic, but some supermarkets, hospitals, banks and television stations also had problems.

dpa