CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm based in Austin, Texas, has been linked to the Microsoft outage that affected airlines, banks, and other businesses worldwide on Friday.
The company provides antivirus software for Microsoft Windows devices, which are used by various industries worldwide, including banking, retail, and healthcare, to protect against breaches and hackers.
The outages on Friday, which caused the notorious “blue screen of death,” were connected to “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement. He emphasized that the issue was “not a security incident or cyberattack,” and that Mac and Linux hosts were unaffected.
“It’s wild that one security update can have such a ripple effect, but it shows how interconnected and fragile a lot of the technology infrastructure that’s used around the world is,” said Adam Satariano, a technology correspondent for The New York Times, on “CBS Mornings.”
Jim Cramer of CNBC, in an interview with Kurtz, noted that CrowdStrike has a “stellar reputation.” Founded in 2011, the company operates in over 170 countries, has about 29,000 customers, and reported more than $900 million in revenue for the quarter ending in April, according to Reuters.
CrowdStrike not only provides security software but also investigates hacks and tracks hackers. It describes itself as “a leader in protecting customers around the world from cyber threats” and is often hired by organizations to investigate and remediate cyberattacks, even in collaboration with law enforcement.
The firm notably investigated the Russian hack on Democratic National Committee computers in 2016 and has tracked North Korean hackers for years.
What Caused the Microsoft Outage?
When CBS News contacted CrowdStrike’s technical support line on Friday, a pre-recorded message indicated the company was aware of crashes on Microsoft systems related to its Falcon Sensor software. Falcon, a CrowdStrike product, aims to stop breaches through “cloud-delivered technologies that prevent all types of attacks,” according to the company.
Kurtz stated on Friday that a fix had been deployed for the issue. In an interview with CNBC’s Cramer, he apologized to all affected organizations, individuals, and groups.
“This was not a code update,” Kurtz explained. “This was actually an update of content. And what that means is there’s a single file that drives some additional logic on how we look for bad actors, and this logic was pushed out and caused an issue only in the Microsoft environment specific to this bug that we had.”
“We identified this very quickly and rolled back this particular content file,” he added.
Kurtz mentioned that many systems could be rebooted to resolve the problem, while others might take more time to recover — “hours” or “a little bit longer.”
“We’re working individually with every customer to make sure that we can get them up and running and operational,” Kurtz said.
CrowdStrike’s Stock
The global fallout from the outage dented CrowdStrike’s stock price, which fell $42.22, or more than 12%, to just over $300 in afternoon trading.
However, the setback is more likely to affect the firm’s reputation than to cause significant financial damage, as CrowdStrike is valued at more than $73 billion.
“CrowdStrike has a strong brand and global marketing presence, which will need to go into next gear over the coming weeks and months to curtail some damage from this,” equity analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush told investors in a research note.
