Following the IT outage at the software company Crowdstrike in July, almost three quarters of the companies affected described the impact as serious for the German economy. This is the result of a non-representative survey by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the digital association Bitkom among 331 companies affected by the outages.
According to a statement, 62 percent of the companies affected at the time suffered direct consequences such as the failure of their own PCs or servers. 48 percent felt indirect effects because suppliers, customers or business partners were affected.
Almost half of the companies had to cease operations
“Almost half of the companies directly or indirectly affected had to temporarily cease operations – on average for ten hours,” says the BSI. Two thirds are certain that such an incident cannot be completely prevented in their own company.
BSI President Claudia Plattner called on companies to take precautionary measures to become more resilient to IT security incidents. “To do this, it is important to give users the greatest possible control over update processes,” she explained. Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst described the outages as a “warning shot.” “We urgently need to continue to improve our cybersecurity and need the corresponding expertise in companies and authorities,” he explained.
On July 19, a faulty update to a cybersecurity solution from the US software company Crowdstrike led to numerous IT outages worldwide. According to estimates by Windows developer Microsoft, around 8.5 million computers were affected. The consequences were particularly severe in air traffic, but some supermarkets, hospitals, banks and television stations also had problems.
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