CrowdStrike Outage Losses Estimated at a Staggering $5.4B

As the CrowdStrike Falcon outage story continues to unfold, the monetary losses to businesses from the global incident continue to rise: The volume is likely to reach $5.4 billion in costs for Fortune 500 companies, according to a report from Parametrix.

Parametrix researchers have found that roughly 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced disruptions due to the incident, the most heavily affected industries financially being healthcare ($1.94 billion in estimated losses) and banking ($1.15 billion). In addition, a shocking 100% of the transportation and airlines sector was affected, and the group will rack up an estimated $0.86 billion in losses, according to the forecast. The $5.4 billion estimate excludes Microsoft.

The researchers noted that the outage impact to some industries, like software and IT-related services, is more likely to cause a "ripple effect beyond Fortune 500 companies," though hard numbers were not quantified in the report.

Parametrix previously detailed how the cloud acted as the catalyst for the widespread impact of the outage, and said that "the event highlights the critical dependency of major corporations on cloud services, and the systemic risks posed by such disruptions." To prevent future losses, the new report encourages cyber insurers and risk-assessors to concentrate on mapping, managing, and assessing cloud-based service provider exposure; and stressed that it's important to take a broad view, and not rely solely on the CrowdStrike event as a primary reference for "modeling future system failures involving cloud-based service providers."