Asia Tech Wire (July 24) -- A Microsoft spokesperson recently said in a Wall Street Journal interview that the European Union should be to blame for the world's largest IT systems failure.

A software update from U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused several IT systems to fail around the world, affecting 8.5 million Windows devices.

The spokesperson said that the EU's restrictions, which resulted in its inability to lock down Windows systems, were one of the reasons that triggered the world's largest IT outage.

A 2009 agreement between Microsoft and the EU, in which Microsoft promised to give all security software the same access to the Windows kernel as Microsoft's own software, allowed security products from third-party security software developers like CrowdStrike to access and perform extremely sophisticated operations through APIs in Windows client and server systems.

Microsoft believes that the cost of this policy is a reduction in system security.

A spokesperson for the European Commission pushed back on the allegation, saying that Microsoft never raised any security concerns with the commission, either before or after the incident.