Friday's outage not first global tech disaster involving CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz

A faulty software update from US-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a massive IT outage on Friday (July 19), affecting critical services from airlines and banks to hospitals and stock exchanges. However, very few know that this is the second major tech meltdown in which CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been involved in.

He was also the Chief Technology Officer of McAfee in 2010, when a security update from the antivirus firm crashed tens of thousands of computers. Friday’s outage reminded some people of the McAfee gaffe dating back to 2010 when the antivirus firm inadvertently sparked a worldwide shutdown of Windows XP PCs, according to NewsByte. What surprised the people more was the fact that Kurtz served as the CTO of McAfee in 2010. A post on X talking about his involvement in two major tech bungles has gone viral with over 1.6 million views.

Meanwhile, Kurtz’s personal net worth dipped by more than $300 million on Friday because of the faulty update. According to Forbes, he was worth $3.2 billion on Thursday, but his net worth went down to $2.9 billion Friday as CrowdStrike stock plunged 11%.

All about CrowdStrike

A US-based cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike was established in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dimitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. Kurtz also founded the computer security software company Foundstone, besides serving as the chief technology officer of McAfee.

The company has carved a niche for itself in the cybersecurity space over the years. It has been playing a key role in aiding organisations identify and contain cyber threats. More than 29,000 companies, including banks, hospitals, airliners, and several Fortune 500 companies, reportedly use cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike.

Based on a 2023 report by Canalys, CrowdStrike is the world leader in endpoint security with an 18.5 per cent market share in Q2 2023. Similarly, media reports suggest that the stocks of the company have increased by 400% in the last five years. The phenomenal rise of the company, which is now valued at $83.4 billion, can be attributed to its aggressive marketing efforts. The company almost instantly became a leader in cybersecurity and witnessed steady growth in its popularity in the last decade.

CrowdStrike has been known for offering customised cybersecurity solutions to large organisations to help with their complex security architecture. Significantly, the organisations that have been using CrowdStrike’s solution have praised it for offering user-friendly solutions and hailed its accuracy in identifying threats.

What caused outage?

The global outage is being attributed to an update CrowdStrike made to Falcon, its marquee cybersecurity platform. It is a cloud-based software product. When CrowdStrike pushed an update to the Falcon software, which interacts with other parts of computer systems and software like Microsoft’s Windows products, it caused a malfunction that essentially disabled those systems and their widely used pieces of software the world over.

To put it precisely, the software intended to protect against crashes and disruptions in vital computer systems ended up taking them down. CrowdStrike’s CEO Kurtz has apologised for the outage, which the company said was due to a faulty piece of code.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote on Twitter. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”