Consumer Intelligence has reported that the insurance industry has shown considerable resilience and is recovering after the largest IT outage in history.
On Friday, 19 July, a flawed Windows update from CrowdStrike affected IT systems around the world, causing widespread pricing and quotability disruption.
According to reports, 8.5 million devices were impacted, including many operating within the UK motor and home insurance sectors. Disruptions included registration look up failures, underwriting changes causing large price increases, and significant drops in quotability.
In home, price increases were recorded for 17 brands on Friday, with four brands seeing average day-on-day increases ranging from 32% to a 65% for annual premiums. However, by Saturday, home insurance pricing appeared to stabilise, although further analysis is needed to understand the long-term impacts fully.
In motor, 25 brands showed price increases on Friday, with many of the more significant increases likely to have resulted from registration lookups failures. Some sites were unable to use services that match registration numbers to vehicle details, therefore requiring consumers to input makes and models manually.
While most of these issues have now been resolved, several brands continue to report disruption to their contact centres and live chat availability. Other knock-on impacts could include progressing claims and confirming coverage.
