Microsoft IT outage live: CrowdStrike says ‘significant number’ of impacted devices back online

CrowdStrike said a significant number of the over 8.5 million devices affected from Friday’s botched software update are back online.

The outage led to over 1,500 cancelled flights in the US and dozens more across the UK for the third day in a row, leaving passengers stranded across airports.

Hospitals, GPs, pharmacies, banks, supermarkets andmillions of businesses have also been impacted.

CrowdStrike said the outage was caused by a defect in an update to its “Falcon” cybersecurity defence software for Windows hosts.

Over the weekend, Microsoft released a recovery tool to help repair Windows machines hit by the glitch that affected over 8.5 million devices.

However, experts warned that it could take weeks for global tech infrastructure to fully recover.

“Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday GPs would still need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend, and NHSE should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately,” David Wrigley, deputy chair of GPC England at the BMA, said.

A global IT outage is “likely” to occur again unless governments and industry work together to “design out” technological flaws, a leading cyber expert has said.

Professor Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said “the worst” of the global IT outage was over but countries would “have to learn to cope” with future flaws.

The founding chief executive of the NCSC told Sky News: “The worst of this is over because the nature of the crisis was such that it went very badly wrong, very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly and, essentially, it was turned off.”

Sam Hall reports:

Professor Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the NCSC, said