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CrowdStrike says more machines fixed as customers, regulators await details on what caused meltdown

CrowdStrike says more machines fixed as customers, regulators await details on what caused meltdown
The logo for CrowdStrike and a Spirit Airlines webpage are shown on a computer screen and mobile phone screen, in New York, Friday, July 19, 2024. A global technology outage grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air after a faulty software update disrupted companies and services around the world and highlighted their dependence on just a handful of providers. Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a "significant number" of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, are back in operation as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.

A defective software update sent by CrowdStrike to its customers disrupted , banks, hospitals and other critical services Friday, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system. The painstaking work of fixing it has often required a company's IT crew to manually delete files on affected machines.

CrowdStrike said late Sunday in a blog post that it was starting to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem.

Shares of the Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped nearly 30% since the meltdown, knocking off billions of dollars in .

The scope of the disruptions has also caught the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcers, though it remains to be seen if they take action against the company.

"All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from and airlines to and auto-dealers," said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in a Sunday post on the social media platform X. "Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems."

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Citation: CrowdStrike says more machines fixed as customers, regulators await details on what caused meltdown (2024, July 22) retrieved 22 July 2024 from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-crowdstrike-machines-customers-await-meltdown.html
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