The global tech outage that took entire industries offline on Friday carries with it a hefty price tag for the impacted businesses.
Airlines were the hardest hit companies financially, followed by software & IT
The global tech outage that took entire industries offline on Friday carries with it a hefty price tag for the impacted businesses.
The cost to Fortune 500 companies, minus Microsoft $MSFT, is in the ballpark of $5.4 billion, according to estimates by cloud monitoring and insurance firm Parametrix. Each company faces varying cost levels, ranging from $6 million for those in the manufacturing business, to up to $143 million in the airline industry.
Airlines were the hardest hit companies, followed by those in the software and IT sector, banking, health, and finance. In all, a quarter of the Fortune 500 was impacted, including 100% of airlines and 43% of retailer & wholesaler companies, Parametrix found.
Over half of Fortune 500 companies use software from CrowdStrike $CRWD, the Texas-based cybersecurity company behind Friday’s massive global tech outage that grounded thousands of flights and left industries scrambling.
Beyond the direct financial losses, there were several impacts to the Fortune 500 businesses and their partners. An analysis of the impacts by Parametrix found that companies using physical computers faced longer recovery times, and that the effects of the outage were unique thanks to its combined physical and cloud deployment.
“Insurers should therefore not rely solely on the CrowdStrike event for modeling future cloud-based failures,” the firm said.
CrowdStrike, too, has suffered a financial blow from the incident. Its stock is down more than 22% since Thursday, prior to the outage. Its market capitalization has plunged more than $20 billion.
CrowdStrike posted a detailed description Wednesday of the incident — including what went wrong, and why.
The firm said the issue lay in its test software, which allowed an update to be approved despite containing “problematic content data.” In other words, it was a bug to a software update. Once the bug was received and loaded, the defective content in the file resulted in an output that “could not be gracefully handled,” causing Microsoft Windows operating systems to crash — what’s known as the “blue screen of death.”
All devices running Microsoft Windows that rely on CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon Sensor software, which is designed to protect against malware and other cybersecurity threats, went offline. The outage didn’t affect Mac or Linux operating systems.
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