Microsoft IT outage live: Millions of devices affected by CrowdStrike failure as recovery to ‘take weeks’

Millions of Windows devices were affected by the global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike’s update, according to Microsoft.

The company said 8.5million devices — less than 1 per cent of Windows machines — were hit by the glitch which caused chaos around the world on Friday.

It comes as IT experts warn it could take weeks for global tech infrastructure to fully recover after the botched software update brought down systems worldwide.

Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said: “In some cases, the fix may be applied very quickly. But if computers have reacted in a way that means they’re getting into blue screens, that could take days and weeks.”

The massive disruption to Microsoft systems has included flight delays and cancellations, as well as impacting hospitals, banks, supermarkets and millions of businesses.

Close to 7,000 flights were cancelled globally on Friday – equating to 6.2 per cent of all scheduled flights, according to Aviation analytics firm Cirium.

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 countries would ‘have to learn to cope’ with future