Microsoft-CrowdStrike Outage: 32% of Partners Saw No Client Impact

The CrowdStrike outage felt 'round the world may not have impacted channel partners – particularly those of the SMB focus – as seriously as expected.

The IT world cast its attention on a mass outage of Windows machines on July 19, which stemmed from a faulty update from antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) provider CrowdStrike. The losses to Fortune 500 companies will reportedly total more than $5 billion, with smaller businesses suffering as well. But a new poll by research firm Canalys demonstrates the disproportionately high impact on larger companies.

A survey of 170 channel partners in Canalys' Candefero community shows nuances in how different partner types, business segments and regions experienced the devastating outage. (Canalys is owned by Informa, a Channel Futures parent company).

CrowdStrike Outage: Impact by Segment

Specifically, the poll queried partners if the majority of their impacted customers were enterprise (more than 500 employees), midsize (100-499) or small business (less than 100), or if they saw no difference. Notably, almost one in three (32%) of partners said none of their customers saw any impact. On the other hand, 16% said "all customers" were impacted, regardless of segment.

But when it came to the customer bases that saw an impact, enterprise clearly hurt the most. More than one in four (28%) partners said that mostly enterprise accounts were affected. Next came midsize (14%) and small business (10%).

Related:How Managed Service Providers Handled CrowdStrike Outage

Q. What customers were primarily impacted by the IT outage on July 19?

Courtesy: Canalys

That segmentation disparity made sense to Jay McBain, who researches channels, partnerships and ecosystems for Canalys.

Canalys' Jay McBain

"CrowdStrike originated in large enterprise (where we saw most of the issues with airlines and banks) and has been aggressively going down-market through the channel," he said. "Our audience is highly correlated to the 'S' part of SMB and was mostly insulated from the 8.5 million machines that were affected."

MSP Outage Impact

When Canalys subdivided the results by partner type, interesting results emerged. For example, 41% of managed service providers (MSPs) said none of their customers were impacted. And 45% of systems integrators (SIs) reported no customer impact. Twenty-six percent of corporate resellers said all of their customers were impacted by the outage.

Q. What customers were primarily impacted by the IT outage on July 19? (by partner type)

Courtesy: Canalys

On the the MSP side, the high number of non-impacted customer bases lines up with what MSPs have told Channel Futures. For example, Mann Consulting works predominantly with Apple devices, and as a result, only dealt with about 50-60 impacted devices.

Related:Beyond 'Pointing Fingers:' Partners React to CrowdStrike Outage

Furthermore, many MSPs focus on small and midsize customers, which the survey shows saw less of an impacted.

Latin America, Asia Pacific Suffered Most

The survey also broke up the answers by regional segments and showed noticeable geographical differences.

Forty-seven percent of partners said none of their customers were impacted by the CrowdStrike outage. Latin America (23%) and Asia Pacific (25%) were more likely than Europe, the Middle East and Africa (10%) and North America (13%) to say all of their customers were impacted.

Q. What customers were primarily impacted by the IT outage on July 19? (by region)

Courtesy: Canalys

Matthew Ball, who leads global infrastructure, cloud and cybersecurity research for Canalys, said the results of the poll matched with CrowdStrike's reported revenues.

Canalys' Matthew Ball

"In its latest quarterly results, ending April, 68% of its revenue was generated in the U.S. It is expanding its customer base and partner coverage in EMEA and APAC, which is reflected in the partners’ responses," Ball told Channel Futures.

Meantime, Microsoft on Tuesday morning reported a networking issue affecting certain 365 services. Word, PowerPoint and Outlook were among the apps suffering disruption.