“Today was not a security or cyber incident,” said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of the CrowdStrike, in a Friday X post . He was referring to a widespread outage that began Thursday night.
This outage impacted Microsoft 365 users and caused all sorts of havoc – from grounding planes to preventing major TV stations from operating and more. Many people with office jobs likely had at least one service acting wonky Friday due to it.
In fact, CNBC said it was the “largest IT outage in history.”
What does CrowdStrike have to do with all this? Well, even though the outage impacted Microsoft features, its cause actually stems from a CrowdStrike update.
What is CrowdStrike?
According to its website , the company is the “world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise.”
It was founded in 2012 with $26 million in funding by Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston . At the time, Kurtz described it as a “security technology company focused on helping enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive intellectual property and national security information.”
Per Kurtz’s company bio , he is an internationally recognized security expert, author, entrepreneur, and speaker with more than 30 years of experience in the security space. He previously worked at McAfee, a $2.5 billion security company. Kurtz also started security products and services company Foundstone in October 1999. It was acquired by McAfee in 2004.
With CrowdStrike, he said he wanted to “fundamentally change,” how organizations manage their security. Over the past 12 years, the company has grown with new rounds of funding. It has often been singled out as an industry leader.
“CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today’s adversaries and stop breaches,” the company explained.
The Verge reported that the Texas-based software company plays an important role in helping other companies (currently around 29,000 customers, including more than 500 on the Fortune 1000 list) deal with security breaches. It has helped investigate the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 , as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, said the outlet.
“As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion,” it added.
Why did the outage happen?
CrowdStrike’s main objective is to provide security and protection, and Kurtz has been clear that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. It was the result of a software update.
“There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts,” said Kurtz.
An update from the company further explained that: “Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor,” a security program that protects against viruses, device control and more. This glitch was linked to a problematic channel file that has since been reverted. CrowdStrike also offered workaround tips for those still experiencing issues related to the update Friday.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” said Kurtz.
Still, the impacts of an update that, as Yahoo! Finance said, “ knocked the world offline ” – such as a pause in procedures requiring anesthesia at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a pause in 911 services in Alaska – are disconcerting.
“The incident is a great example of the cascading failures that can occur given our relatively homogenous systems that comprise the backbone of IT infrastructure,” said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University, according to Quartz . “Cybersecurity providers are part of this homogenous backbone of modern systems and are so core to how we operate that a glitch in their operations will have similar impacts to failures in systems that are household names.”
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