The percentage of the population who did/didn't know of Crowdstrike probably reversed in the past week

At least in the western world I think it's possible. A lot of people I know who don't know much of anything about computers before this now know of Crowdstrike, although they don't know any specifics.

Cute, but no.

I thnk that you vastly over estimate just how many computers and people were affected.

Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million computers were hit.

The computers hit were in the vast majority enterprise computers and mostly in the "Western World".

In 2022, in millions, Lenovo shipped 68 million computers, HP 55.3, Dell 49.7, Apple 28.6, Asus 20.6, Acer 18.7, the rest around 70.1, that's 286.2 million new computers shipped in 2022 alone.

In case you think that includes phones, nope, Samsung alone shipped 260.9 million mobile devices.

There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Most of them have never heard of CrowdStrike and never will.

I'm an ICT professional with 40 years experience and I'd never heard of them and I'd be surprised if they continue to exist for very much longer, all but guaranteeing that the name will become a footnote in history.

Source: https://windowsreport.com/how-many-computers-are-in-the-world-2022/
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident

So like. Hear me out.

What if, even if you were not personally affected, you still heard about crowdstrike because of the coverage?

I'm an ICT professional with 40 years experience and I'd never heard of them

But you have heard of them now, right? Kind of like that
- Let's say 99.99% of the World's population had not heard of them before this happened, and I think those numbers are very generous.
  
  Does anyone seriously believe that after this event only 0.01% of the World didn't learn about them?
- When my grandparents call me to ask about something, I consider it main stream.
  
  They called me the day it happened asking wtf was up.
  
  I definitely think that the amount of people who know about has shot up probably a couple thousand percentage points, and not for the better, but it definitely didn't flip.
  
  The other guy needs to Google what "hyperbole" is though
"Cute, but no." is accurate. You can calculate that in the shower. Showerthoughts isn't an excuse to be dumb.

Some of the people here are in the theme of "I didn't mean 'literally' when I said 'literally'".
- So the actual showerthought is what, "More people probably know about Crowdstrike now compared to last week?"
Hmmm.

So, OP didn't qualify which population they were percenting, which is a fair cop. You're setting the sample as "the world", and for sure those isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in central America totally didn't hear about it!

However, "number of computers" isn't a good way to measure this. I guarantee that every traveler who was trying to fly over the past week heard about it, because when it took down the airport computers, it created a travel backlog they're still clearing out.

Further, a 2014 study showed that more Americans work at large firms than small ones, and these are the very institutions hit worst by CrowdStrike. When it hit my wife's company, it took IT until this week to restore everyone's computer. First they worked on critical infrastructure, then they worked to restore laptops that had been shut down; for several days, entire teams were unable to do anything. And you bet that even of you're a self-employed plumber, you'd have heard about it when your spouse had an unscheduled vacation for several days. My wife was lucky and hadn't restarted her computer, and was terrified to do so until she got the all-clear from corporate IT. This being Windows, that meant that every day her computer got slower and slower; I don't know what it is about Windows that requires a reboot every couple of days to keep it from turning into a Commodore 64. Anyway, that was about 100k people around the world, and their spouses. Oh, and since you chose to include "the world" population, their kids probably heard about it, too. We have to discount all the infants, though; that for sure brings the percentage down 🙄

I agree with OP: it would be interesting to know how many adults in developed countries were completely unaware of the event. Versus how many in developing countries, even. It wasn't a stupid question.

I’m still not sure what they do, though. The first articles I read made me think it was anti-malware for endpoint computers but some later comments made it sound like corporate spyware to track employee productivity. Maybe both?

It's definitely not the latter. It's a fancy antivirus known as an EDR - Endpoint Detection and Response. Purely security software for defending against cyber attacks
Yeah, more or less both

Not sure, people outside IT world, at least in my country, still speak about the "Microsoft crash" and don't know at all about Crowdstrike. Now that make me think that MS will probably try to sue them for the "ravages" to their corporate image.

You think people who knew about it suddenly forgot?

That wouldn't be required for the person's statement to be true.

All press is good press?