Costs From Global Outage Could Exceed $1B – But Determining Liability is Complex
The world quickly learned that cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike was responsible for a crippling global tech outage on Friday. However, determining who will cover the cost of the damages might take significantly longer.
What one cybersecurity expert described as possibly the “largest IT outage in history” resulted in the cancellation of over 5,000 commercial airline flights worldwide and disrupted businesses from retail sales to package deliveries to hospital procedures, incurring losses in revenue, staff time, and productivity.
The issue stemmed from faulty code in CrowdStrike’s software “content update.” Unfortunately, rectifying the error proved far more time-consuming than causing it, and it could be days before all systems return to normal.
In a social media post late Sunday, CrowdStrike stated that a “significant number” of the approximately 8.5 million affected devices were back online and operational. They also issued another apology for the disruption.
