Germany looking into financial damages caused by CrowdStrike outage

The Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), Germany’s cybersecurity agency, and branch organization Bitkom have launched an investigation to ascertain the financial damages caused by the CrowdStrike outage.

In July, an unreliable update from CrowdStrike caused major problems all around the world. Public transportation was at a standstill, thousands of flights had to be canceled, and emergency and financial services were disrupted.

The faulty update affected over 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide and was directly responsible for heavy financial losses. Insurance companies calculated the preliminary insured losses of the outage around $ 1.5 billion.

According to the BSI, it’s hard to make an estimation of the financial losses for the German economy because there’s simply no objective data at the time.

“Therefore, the digital association Bitkom and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have initiated a study to help determine the extent of the damage caused by the system failures,” Germany’s cybersecurity agency says in a press release.

Companies and organizations that were directly or indirectly affected by the global outage can fill out an online survey. They can tell about the type and scope of the disturbance, the immediate consequences, the effort it took to restore IT operations and the estimated financial damages.

According to Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst the outage demonstrates the frailty of the German economy. “It clearly shows our economy must become more resilient. Companies need contingency plans, have to set up redundant systems and create regular backups. With the study we want to find out how the German economy is structured and how serious the effects of the IT system failures as a result of the crowd strike update,” he says.

Companies and organizations from Germany have until August 21 to fill out the survey. Participation is anonymous and takes about ten minutes.