Even as CrowdStrike offers $10 Uber Eats vouchers as compensation, businesses around the world are still counting the losses they incurred last week as the US-cybersecurity firm’s outage led to “blue screens of death” cropping up on millions of systems.

From retail and transport to finance and logistics – there was seemingly no sector that was left unimpacted by the incident which Microsoft says affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide.

US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, face approximately A$8.21 billion in losses as a result of the CrowdStrike outage, with Microsoft’s losses adding hundreds of millions of dollars more to the total, cloud insurer Parametrix said on Wednesday.

Analysts are already bracing for companies such as Delta Air Lines which cancelled more than 5,000 flights to take an approximately A$760.16 million hit.

Cyber insurance policies will likely cover no more than 10-20 per cent of the losses, or between A$820.97 million and A$1.64 billion, estimated Parametrix. It said that direct financial losses will be the biggest in the healthcare industry, followed by the banking and airline sectors.

Crowdstrike

Parametrix CEO Jonathan Hatzor told The Post that he recommends companies move away from their reliance on physical computers in favour of cloud-based systems. “Recovery was more dramatic and faster for cloud-companies compared to more legacy industries, like healthcare and airlines,” said Hatzor.

In Australia, thousands of businesses including NBN, Bendigo Bank, Foxtel, National Australia Bank, Australia Post, Suncorp, Xero, Commonwealth Bank, MYOB, ME Bank, Optus, Telstra Amazon, Westpac, Google, ANZ and Microsoft in Australia were impacted by the outage.

Business leaders in the country have said that the financial hit on Australian businesses from CrowdStrike’s IT outage could cross the $1 billion mark with its impact being felt for weeks.

As ChannelNews recently reported, several retailers in Australia who bore the brunt of the outage have moved to lodge insurance claims, but legal experts have warned that they may have limited options with the big US company forcing Australian companies to sign contracts that are governed by New York’s governing law and arbitration processes.

Australia retailers and suppliers typically have business interruption insurance with several large insurance groups now facing claims. These insurance companies can in turn possibly form a class action claim and take their case to a US Court where payouts are generally higher than Australia.