Millions of people were negatively affected, directly or indirectly, as a result of CrowdStrike's faulty update that launched early on Friday, July 19. Microsoft said later that 8.5 million Windows PC were hit with the botched CrowdStrike update. The results were major businesses being hit with lengthy amounts of downtime and even some critical systems like 911 calls were shut down temporarily.
Today, Microsoft posted a new article on its Windows IT Pro blog that talked about how the company has tried to help bring back the shutdown PCs. That includes having over 5,000 of its support engineers working constantly to restore those systems. It also released guides of how users could bring back the CrowdStrike affected PCs, including a recovery tool.
The blog post added:
This incident shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience. These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem.
While it did not offer any specifics on any future plans to improve Windows resilience, the blog post did mention a couple of recent company efforts, including VBS enclaves, and the Microsoft Azure Attestation service. It stated:
These examples use modern Zero Trust approaches and show what can be done to encourage development practices that do not rely on kernel access. We will continue to develop these capabilities, harden our platform, and do even more to improve the resiliency of the Windows ecosystem, working openly and collaboratively with the broad security community.
The blog post ended with Microsoft stating that it will share what it has learned from this incident, as well as discuss "changes designed to strengthen the broader ecosystem moving forward." It also mentions a list of things businesses can do to make sure they can recover quickly from a similar issue. That includes common sense solutions such as backing up data often and security, and creating a way to restore Windows PCs quickly.
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