On July 18, 2024 (Pacific Time), a software update by independent cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused multiple IT systems worldwide to malfunction. Although this is not Microsoft's own technical issue, considering that this incident has already affected the company's ecosystem, we would like to introduce what measures Microsoft, together with CrowdStrike and other companies, has taken in the past period to promptly fix and provide support services to customers.

Since the beginning of the incident, we have been in continuous communication with our clients, CrowdStrike, and external developers to gather information and find solutions as soon as possible. We are well aware that this incident has had a negative impact on the daily lives of many businesses and individuals. We hope to safely restore the interrupted system to normal as soon as possible by providing technical guidance and support to users. The specific measures taken include:

Quickly collaborate with CrowdStrike and develop solutions through automation. CrowdStrike recommended an alternative solution to address this issue and released a public statement. Windows Message Center has synchronously released a guide on how to solve this problem on Windows terminals.

Hundreds of Microsoft engineers and technical experts work directly with customers to restore services.

Collaborate with other cloud computing providers and stakeholders, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), to share their respective impacts and situations in the industry, while keeping CrowdStrike informed in a timely manner and maintaining active communication with customers.

Provide users with timely updates on the latest developments of events through the Azure Status Dashboard.

Microsoft is working day and night to provide continuous updates and support. In addition, CrowdStrike has also helped us develop a scalable solution to accelerate the repair of CrowdStrike's erroneous updates for Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud Azure infrastructure. We also collaborate with AWS and GCP to jointly research more efficient solutions.

Software updates occasionally cause service disruptions, but major events like the CrowdStrike update are not common. According to current estimates, the CrowdStrike update incident affected 8.5 million Windows devices, which is less than 1% of the total number of Windows devices. Although the proportion is small, it has had a huge impact on the economic and social functioning. This reflects that many key service enterprises are using CrowdStrike.

This incident confirms that within Microsoft's extensive ecosystem, from global cloud service providers and software platforms, to security service providers and other software vendors, to our customers, we are all interconnected