Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.
It’s the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.
The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.
Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”
I wonder how much this cost people & businesses.
For instance, people’s flights were canceled because of this resulting in them having to stay in hotels overnight. I’m sure there’s many other examples.
For businesses, a lot of them are hiring IT companies (consultants, MSPs, VARs, and whoever the hell else they can get) at a couple to a few hundred bucks an hour per person to get boots on the ground to fix it. Some of them have everyone below the C levels with any sort of technical background doing entry level work so there’s also lost opportunity cost.
I was in that industry for a long time and still have a lot of colleagues there. There’s a guy I know making almost $200k/yr out there at desks trying to help fix it. He moved into an SRE role years ago so that’s languishing this week while he’s going desk to desk and office to office with support staff and IT contractors.
At least two large companies have an API where they’re paying for a pile of compute and currently have a small fraction of use. Companies are paying to use those APIs but can’t.
I don’t know if there’s a good way to actually figure out how much this is costing because there are so many variables. But you can bet there are a few people at the top funneling that money directly to themselves, never to be seen again.
That’s kind of what I thinking. There’s countless ways this costs money. And not an insignificant amount either.
Also, I work IT and have been in vacation. So sad I am missing all this!
Something I didn’t think about but has since come to my attention (group chat is getting spicy) is that there are a lot of mid level IT folks on salary who are getting the absolute dog shit worked out of them right now without seeing an extra dime. So the costs are beyond monetary.