Microsoft outage live updates: Worldwide travel and banking hit after cybersecurity update

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A $16bn problem for Crowdstrikepublished at 11:11

Faisal Islam
Economics editor

Crowdstrike has lost a fifth of its value in pre-market trading in the US – down 21% in unofficial trading.

If confirmed when US stock markets open later today, that is a loss of $16 billion in its overnight valuation.

Industry insiders say the problem is centred on the fact that cloud security companies have very high level privileges to update the core systems of their customers.

When this works, it helps protect their systems. When an attempted update fails, it brings down the systems they are supposed to protect, all at once.

While the fix is in theory, simple – updating systems physically from backup disks – in practice this is now more difficult in a cloud computing world.

Governments face serious questions about how resilient our economic infrastructure is to this sort of epic failure.

Does it make sense to allow significant concentration on one company or product?