Paul Stenhouse: Continued outages from the CrowdStrike outage, WhatsApp's US userbase continues to grow

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

A week on from CrowdStrike's outage and not all systems are back online

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post yesterday that "over 97%" of systems running its software were back online as of 25 July. Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million PCs had been disabled, so that suggests approximately 250,000 devices remain offline. In the US, Delta Airlines is the most high profile victim with lingering issues well into this week continuing to cause flight disruptions, seemingly related to issues with the systems for crewing planes with pilots and flight attendants.

The stock price managed to make a little bit of a recovery on Tuesday, but is continuing to slide, and it’s down around 10% since the outage. It's taken them back to December 2023 levels, effectively wiping out their 2024 gains.

There are reports today of a new blue screen of death issue - but this time it's not related to CrowdStrike. Microsoft’s latest blue screen can’t be blamed on CrowdStrike, which is popping up on Windows 11 machines that use BitLocker. BitLocker is Microsoft's hard-drive encryption tool that protects data from unauthorized access or theft. The issue isn’t widespread, but those impacted will have to enter a recovery key to get a PC to boot properly.

WhatsApp now has 100 million monthly users in the US

It's the big metropolitan cities showing the biggest growth - Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle. They're also the cities that have the most immigrants. WhatsApp now has more than 2 billion users in over 180 countries, but the dominance of Apple’s iMessage in the US has proven to be a hurdle since the 2014 acquisition for $16 billion. As Google and Apple both adopt RCS messaging, Meta will continue to face an uphill battle.

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