Fortune 500 lost an estimated $5.4B in CrowdStrike outage
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One in 4 Fortune 500 companies experienced a service disruption due to Friday's global IT outages and likely lost a combined $5.4 billion, according to a new report from cyber insurer Parametrix.
Why it matters: The report provides some of the first estimates on how damaging the recent CrowdStrikes outages were to the global economy.
The big picture: On average, affected companies lost an estimated $43.6 million each, according to the Parametrix report.
- All Fortune 500 airlines and roughly 75% of the top healthcare organizations and banks were affected by the outages.
- Parametrix estimates that total insured losses across the Fortune 500 fall between $540 million and $1.08 billion.
Zoom in: The healthcare sector took the biggest collective hit, losing roughly $1.9 billion to the outages.
- In comparison, airlines lost about $860 million, according to Parametrix's analysis.
Between the lines: CrowdStrike only accounts for 15% of the market share for security software segments in 2023, according to Gartner, but that share is highly concentrated on the Fortune 500.
- CrowdStrike has said that it works with 298 of the Fortune 500.
Yes, but: The software and IT-related services sector was one of the least affected industries, according to Parametrix, with only 21% facing outages.
- That's because most software companies run on Linux, which was unaffected by CrowdStrike's faulty software update.
- "This could be viewed as a silver lining, because a high impact on this sector would have resulted in an even larger ripple effect, given this sector includes some of the largest service providers in the world," the report notes.
Go deeper: CrowdStrike outage is a wake-up call
