Microsoft said Friday it will hold a summit in September to discuss steps to improve its cybersecurity systems, coming after a flawed CrowdStrike update caused a global outage last month.
The conference marks Microsoft’s first major step to address the issues that hit nearly 8.5 million Windows devices on July 19, disrupting industries from major airlines to banks to healthcare.
The event will take place on September 10 at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The company will invite government officials to the meeting, it said in a blog post.
“The CrowdStrike outage in July provides an important lesson for us as an ecosystem that we can apply,” Microsoft said.
The outage has raised concerns that many organisations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans in the event of a single point of failure, such as an IT system or piece of software.
“We look forward to contributing our perspective to the conversation with Microsoft, industry and government leaders on the need to create a more resilient ecosystem,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson said when reached for comment.
Analysts say the outage exposed the risks of depending on a single vendor for a complete security solution.
CrowdStrike, whose market value has fallen by about $9 billion since the outage, is being sued by shareholders who say the cybersecurity firm defrauded them by concealing how inadequate software testing could have caused global disruptions.
Earlier this month, Delta Air Lines announced legal action against CrowdStrike and Microsoft after the outage caused mass flight cancellations and cost the carrier at least $500 million.
CrowdStrike plans to report its second-quarter financial results after the close of the U.S. market on Aug. 28.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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