Microsoft says global tech glitch affects 8.5mln windows devices

Moscow: A global IT outage has affected 8.5 million devices running the Windows operating system, Microsoft said.

On Friday morning, a global failure of Windows-based equipment affected telecommunications operators, banks, and airlines around the world. US company CrowdStrike confirmed that the global failure had occurred due to its update for the Falcon Sensor cybersecurity application.

"We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or 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 said in a statement on Saturday.

The statement added that hundreds of Microsoft engineers and experts were sent to respond to the incident and fix the causes of the outage, working directly with customers.