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Software update that crashed Windows could have been released without testing — researcher

Arutyun Avetisyan said the outage affected Russia only a little because Crowdstrike stopped serving Russian customers in 2022

MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/. The software update that brought down the Windows operating system around the world could have been released without proper testing, said Arutyun Avetisyan, director of the Ivannikov Institute of System Programming.

"The initial assessment of the incident is this: The outage happened because the update of the software that takes care of security of millions of computers, including computers that are part of critical systems, was released and distributed without proper testing," said the director, whose institute is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Over the course of Friday, massive outages of Windows-based computers have been reported from all around the world by international banks, airlines, news media and other companies. The US-based developer of information security solutions Crowdstrike confirmed 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 roll back the software to an earlier version.

The institute director said the outage affected Russia only a little because Crowdstrike stopped serving Russian customers in 2022.