CrowdStrike Accepts “Most Epic Fail” Award For Global IT Outage

CrowdStrike has accepted an award for its mishap after a cybersecurity update caused a global IT outage last month. The “Most Epic Fail” award was presented at the Pwnie Awards over the weekend.

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The company’s president, Michael Sentonas, accepted the Las Vegas Def Con award and gave an acceptance speech acknowledging the IT outage that stopped the world. During the speech, he said it is “super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case.” Sentonas added that he would bring the award to CrowdStrike headquarters because he wanted employees to see it each time they entered the office. Last month, the company’s software update caused 8.5 million Windows machines to shut down, prevented remote recovery, and caused outages at major airlines.

In response to the outage, CrowdStrike said a software bug caused the issue and promised to update its testing plus error handling. “I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for today’s outage. All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority. The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack,” said founder and CEO George Kurtz.

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“We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure that all systems are restored, so you can deliver the services your customers rely on.”

Last year, the award was given to the United States Transportation Security Administration after a hacker, as reported by The Verge , discovered a no-fly list on an unsecured internet-connect server.