The aftermath of the major Crowdstrike outage is likely to be a hefty bill. The aviation sector is suffering the most from the malaise.

Now that the IT world is slowly recovering from the massive Crowdstrike outage that paralyzed 8.5 million Windows devices, it’s time to take stock. Literally: According to initial estimates by Parametrix, an American company that offers insurance services for cloud products, the cost will be more than five billion dollars.

This amount is based on the costs for the 500 largest American companies, 25 percent of which are affected, according to Parametrix. Microsoft is not included in the calculation because it was actively involved in the incident against its will. The average loss caused by the outage is $44 million per company.

Discomfort in aviation

There are big differences depending on the company and industry. The sector most affected by far is aviation. Worldwide, more than a thousand flights had to be cancelled and there were delays. Where flights could continue, employees had to make do with creative interventions such as written boarding passes.

After aviation, there was also major chaos in the banking and healthcare sectors. Sectors such as retail and manufacturing were relatively unscathed, with “minor” losses ranging between five and fifteen million dollars. Thanks to the incident, we now know which sectors Crowdstrike has a strong presence in.

Who will pay?

One hopes that the bill will not be presented to Crowdstrike. This scenario seems unlikely if Crowdstrike has negotiated its contracts wisely. According to Jo Vander Scheuren of Belgian cybersecurity company Jarviss, providers are usually insured against unforeseen situations. “Otherwise it means the end of the company,” says Vander Schueren. Affected companies have to hope that they are properly insured.

Now it’s clearer what went wrong at Crowdstrike. The damned update on July 19 was planned as a routine update, but the automatic validation system missed a costly error in the update file. Crowdstrike promises to check the next updates more carefully before shipping.