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Who pays for Microsoft's outage?

Osa

The large-scale downtime of Microsoft Windows system equipment has caused economic losses to various industries around the world. The incident was mainly caused by an error in the upgrade of a security software program equipped with the Windows system. It is still unclear whether the software development company "Zhongji" will pay for the related losses.

According to a report by CNN on the 21st, Patrick Anderson, CEO of the American research institution Anderson Economic Group, estimated that the economic losses caused by this incident are likely to exceed 1 billion US dollars.

Anderson said that the recent hacker attack on Hidikai Global, a software company that provides services to US car dealers, which caused $1 billion in losses to its customers, affected only one industry, while the Microsoft outage "affected far more customers and businesses, ranging from inconvenience to severe disruption, resulting in irreparable losses."

The downtime caused particularly serious losses to the aviation industry, resulting in thousands of flights being canceled and tens of thousands of flights being delayed worldwide, and a large number of passengers being stranded at airports.

Although Zhongji has apologized, it has not responded to CNN's inquiry on whether it will compensate affected customers.

Dan Ives, a technical analyst at Wedbush Securities in the United States, believes that this incident will trigger a large number of lawsuits. "If you are a lawyer for 'Crowd Strike', you probably won't have a good summer."

However, James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes that there may be exemption clauses in the contracts signed between CrowdStrike and its customers that allow it to avoid compensation.

CNN reported that CrowdStrike is an "industry leader" in cybersecurity with annual revenue of more than $3 billion.

Ives of Wedbush Securities believes that Zhongji's customers will not necessarily abandon the company because of this incident, as switching to other service providers may not be more beneficial, but the damage this incident has brought to Zhongji's reputation is self-evident, making it difficult for it to attract new customers in the future.

Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert and former FBI counterintelligence agent, said that the cybersecurity service industry is highly competitive, and Crowdstrike's peers will take advantage of the opportunity to grab a piece of the pie, and their salesmen can boast: "We have never had this happen before."

Due to an error in the upgrade program of the "Crowdstrike" security software equipped with the Microsoft Windows system, system downtime occurred in many parts of the world starting from the evening of the 18th Greenwich Time, affecting industries such as transportation, finance, medical care, and hotels, causing serious interference to many companies and individual users, and even some systems of the Paris Olympics were affected.

Microsoft said on the 20th that about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected. Crowdstrike said on the 21st that a large number of these devices have resumed normal operation. However, professionals warned that it will take a long time to smooth out the impact of this error on various industries. (End) (Xinhua News Agency Special Report)