The New York Times - Why a security update to Microsoft devices disrupted the economy

Open Markets Institute’s Europe director Max von Thun was quoted on the global CrowdStrike outage, potentially the biggest in history. Von Thun called the “outage a clear demonstration of the dangerous and growing levels of concentration in our critical technology systems.” Similar remarks by von Thun were cited in Healthcare Brew. 

The global technology outage has put a spotlight on how Microsoft, the second-most valuable publicly traded company, is a major provider of software and cloud services for businesses and governments globally.

The tech behemoth, based in Redmond, Wa., has a $3.25 trillion market capitalization, more than the economic output of the United Kingdom, France or Mexico measured in gross domestic product.

Its cloud business, Azure, is a market leader and comprises giant computer server farms around the world that host the data of thousands of corporations and governments. It manufactures computers, and its Windows operating system software is widely used.

That scope makes an outage like the one on Friday painful.

In a statement posted to X, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, had released the update that affected I.T. systems.

“We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online,” he said.

Microsoft’s ubiquity as a vendor for government agencies was raised during a hearing on a security breach that affected the tech giant last month. Lawmakers said the company provided an estimated 85 percent of the federal government’s productivity software with tools like Office and Excel. Microsoft is also one of the top cloud providers for the government, including for the Department of Defense.

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