NEW YORK: The widespread outage in the Microsoft Azure cloud service, caused by a faulty update by the CloudStrike software firm, affected around 8.5 devices based on Windows operating systems, Microsoft reported in its blog. "We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services," the company said. According to the report, Crowdstrike helped Microsoft develop a solution that will accelerate a fix for the faulty update. On July 19 a massive outage of the Windows operating system hampered the functioning of companies in the banking, airlines, media, and several other industries around the world. Problems were reported by a number of banks and companies in the US, Australia, India, UK, and the European Union. The US-based developer of information security solutions Crowdstrike co nfirmed to CNBC that there is a connection between the latest update of its antivirus software and the Windows malfunctions. The company assured that its specialists are working to roll back the software to an earlier version. Source: Philippines News agency