Asia Tech Wire (July 25) -- U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has blamed a content update vulnerability for a global IT outage linked to Microsoft.

CrowdStrike on Wednesday released details of its initial review of the massive network outage, blaming it on a vulnerability in a content configuration update to its cybersecurity platform.

The vulnerability allowed "problematic content data" to be deployed to customer computers, triggering an "unexpected exception" that caused the Windows operating system to crash, the company said.

As part of its new precautions, CrowdStrike said it had stepped up internal testing and implemented a "new check" to prevent the redeployment of such "problematic content".

In addition, the company is staggering the rollout of updates and providing more details about its planned updates.

The company is now working as quickly as possible to restore all systems affected by the pglobal IT outage, with a "significant number" of the roughly 8.5 million affected Windows devices back up and running.

Earlier, the release of a software update for CrowdStrike resulted in a massive outage of Microsoft Windows and some of Microsoft's other applications and services, affecting businesses and users around the world.