“Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online,” posted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X on July 19.
The statement did not capture the hours of global chaos, fear, and frustration that preceded his words. That day, airports in India switched to giving stranded flyers hand-written boarding passes while airlines in the U.S. grounded flights. Shoppers in Australia could not carry out digital payments and U.K. hospitals had to cancel patient appointments. The outage also affected thousands of everyday users who rely on Windows or other Microsoft offerings. Many opened their devices to see a ‘Blue Screen of Death’ error message, and had to scramble to find other devices and platforms.
The issue only escalated through the day. India’s Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said the government was in touch with Microsoft and its associates. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, issued a severity rating of ‘Critical’ for the incident. In the U.S., the White House said President Joe Biden was briefed about the situation.
At the centre of this digital mayhem was CrowdStrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity company. Its CEO George Kurtz announced later a defect was found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts, meaning Mac and Linux hosts were not affected during the outage. Falcon is CrowdStrike’s security platform. The company “quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix”.
Outage to outrage
The CrowdStrike CEO stressed that the incident was not a cyberattack as many had feared, though he warned that “adversaries and bad actors” could still try to exploit the incident.
While most might think of scammers impersonating CrowdStrike company officials, the incident was instead exploited for political gain. Users on X quickly found CrowdStrike’s pro-diversity messaging and its recent posts celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. Many replied with homophobic and racist comments, blaming the IT outage on the company’s DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. Some users also posted anti-Semitic abuse targeting Mr. Kurtz; one such post spreading conspiracy theories about CrowdStrike being a “Jewish #cyberattack company” linked to Israel, recorded over 4,000 views.
Founded in 2011 by Mr. Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston, the company is based in Austin, Texas, and provides cybersecurity solutions across areas such as generative AI workflows, data protection, endpoint security, threat intelligence, real-life simulation exercises, and cloud security. Mr. Kurtz has held significant positions at McAfee, such as Worldwide Chief Technology Officer, GM, and EVP of Enterprise. He had also worked at Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
On June 24, CrowdStrike said it will be added to the S&P 500 Index. The company has around 8,000 employees and operations in over 170 countries. CrowdStrike has worked with Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Target, Amazon, Google, and the U.S. government.
In May, CrowdStrike announced the launch of its Falcon for Defender offering, supporting Microsoft’s Defender deployments, so that it could hunt the threats missed by Microsoft’s own security solution.
“CrowdStrike’s proven AI-powered detections, enriched with industry-leading threat intelligence, identifies the threats that Microsoft Defender misses,” said CrowdStrike at the time, noting that Falcon for Defender would deploy without reboots and would run “silently” along with Microsoft.
Despite the partnership, CrowdStrike markets itself aggressively and does not shy away from pitting itself against rivals — including Microsoft. On the company’s website, CrowdStrike says, “Microsoft’s security products can’t even protect Microsoft. How can they protect you?” About Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike says, “Hard to deploy, hard to use, harder to manage.” Regarding SentinelOne, its take is: “Weak coverage, can’t stop breaches.” About Wiz, CrowdStrike had this to say: “Incomplete CNAPP [Cloud Native Application Protection Platform] that can’t stop breaches.”
On July 19, CrowdStrike shares fell by more than 10%, but the company is still up by 100% compared to this time last year. For the quarter ending April 30, 2024, it announced a total revenue of around $921 million.
On the CrowdStrike website, Mr. Kurtz apologised to customers and partners, but only after users criticised the absence of a public apology during the early hours of the outage.
Others question whether too many critical companies, sensitive organisations, and governments are delegating their security and operational needs to too few providers.
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