Paralyzed for hours

Crowdstrike mishap severely affected companies

Many travelers at airports were particularly affected by the Crowdstrike glitch.(Bild: APA/AFP/Money SHARMA)

According to a study, the worldwide outage of IT systems due to a failed software update at IT specialist Crowdstrike in July had a severe impact on the companies affected. Almost half of them had to shut down operations for an average of ten hours.

As a rule, it took two days for all systems to be up and running again, but for 20 percent of those affected it took three days or longer, according to a survey of companies in Germany published on Thursday by the digital association Bitkom and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

In 62 percent of the 331 companies surveyed, their own PCs and servers were down, while 48 percent felt indirect effects, for example because business partners were unable to work.

"Warning shot"
"This time, it ended mildly, also thanks to the joint efforts of industry and the authorities," said Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst. "But it must be a warning shot for us." Companies and authorities need to improve their IT know-how in order to better deal with unintentional outages or targeted attacks.

"There will still be no 100% protection against IT security incidents in the future," emphasized BSI President Claudia Plattner. However, the risk can be reduced through precautionary measures and IT contingency plans.

In almost two thirds of the companies surveyed, these worked well or very well, the study continued. In contrast, 22 percent had no emergency plan in place. As a consequence of the incident, 66 percent of the companies wanted to improve their precautions or had already done so. These included more regular software updates or improved back-ups. Ten percent of companies had changed their IT security provider or were considering it.

In the summer, a failed update of Crowdstrike's security software paralyzed 8.5 million computers with the Microsoft Windows operating system worldwide. Airlines were particularly badly affected and had to cancel numerous flights. Financial transactions were also affected.