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NEW YORK – A global tech outage that was related to a software update by cyber security firm CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, Microsoft said in a blog post on July 20. “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1 per cent of all Windows machines,” it said in the blog. A software update by global cyber security firm CrowdStrike, one of the largest operators in the industry, that grounded flights, forced broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking. “While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Microsoft said in its blog post. CrowdStrike has helped develop a solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix, Microsoft said, adding that it was working with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, sharing information about the effects Microsoft was seeing across the industry. The air travel industry was that caused thousands of flights to be cancelled, leaving passengers stranded or grappling with hours of delays as airports and airlines were caught up in the IT outage. Delta Air Lines, one of the hardest-hit airlines, said that as of 10am EDT (10pm Singapore time) on July 20, more than 600 flights had been cancelled, adding that additional cancellations were expected. REUTERS