By Nicholas Hatcher
CrowdStrike said over 97% of Microsoft Windows sensors were back online as of Thursday, nearly a week after a global tech outage snarled businesses, government agencies and air travel worldwide.
CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurtz said the company still has more work to do to repair the fallout from last Friday's disruption.
"To our customers still affected, please know we will not rest until we achieve full recovery," Kurtz said Thursday in a post on LinkedIn.
CrowdStrike said in an incident report earlier this week that a bug in a quality-control tool it uses to check system updates for mistakes allowed a critical flaw to be pushed to millions of machines running Microsoft Windows.
About 8.5 million devices were affected by the outage, CrowdStrike said Monday. Many of those machines were part of wider corporate IT systems, meaning the impact was felt more widely.
The errant software update caused worldwide havoc, paralyzing the operations at businesses and organizations, from banks and financial institutions to government agencies and medical centers.
CrowdStrike's stock has plunged in the days since the outage. Kurtz has been summoned to Congress to testify before lawmakers.
The disruption also led to the cancellation or delay of tens of thousands of flights. Delta Air Lines was particularly affected, with more than 5,000 flights canceled last weekend. The carrier had to manually repair over 1,500 systems that were knocked offline, Chief Information Officer Rahul Samant said in a video to employees.
After canceling over 500 flights on Tuesday, according to tracking site FlightAware, Delta had 54 cancellations on Wednesday, roughly 1% of its schedule. Delta had four cancellations on Thursday, according to FlightAware.
Federal transportation officials launched an investigation into the airline's handling of the outage. Delta was offering reimbursements and travel vouchers to those affected by the disruption.
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike warned that hackers were trying to exploit the outage with a malicious file being sent around posing as a "quick fix" to the problem.
Write to Nicholas Hatcher at nicholas.hatcher@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 26, 2024 09:22 ET (13:22 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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