CrowdStrike update blunder may cost world billions – and insurance ain't covering it all
The cost of CrowdStrike's apocalyptic Falcon update that brought down millions of Windows computers last week may be in the billions of dollars, and insurance isn't covering most of that.
That's according to cloud monitoring and insurance biz Parametrix, which this week claimed that US Fortune 500 companies – of which around a fourth were impacted – took a $5.4 billion hit from CrowdStrike's broken channel file. This doesn't include losses for Microsoft; Redmond was excluded from the calculations because "they were a key player in the event."
Parametrix says insurance might only pay out about $540 million to $1.1 billion of that hit for the Fortune 500, or between 10 and 20 percent. That's apparently "due to many companies' large risk retentions, and to low policy limits relative to the potential outage loss," according to the report.
Some industries in the Fortune 500 escaped mostly unscathed. Manufacturing, transportation (excluding airlines), and finance only experienced some tens of millions in losses total each, it's estimated, which is bad but not nearly as bad as other sectors. Retail and IT ate half a billion each total, airlines lost $860 million, and an estimated over three billion dollars was destroyed between the banking and healthcare sectors.
