Who Is CrowdStrike? Spotlight on Firm Tied to Global Outage

The global computer outage affecting airports, banks, and other businesses on Friday seems to be linked, at least in part, to a software update from the major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, according to experts consulted by CNN.

CrowdStrike informed its customers early on Friday that the outages were due to “a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems,” as stated by CEO George Kurtz in a post on X.

The company’s engineers acted to address the issue, advising customers to reboot their computers and perform additional steps if they continued experiencing technical problems. The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s primary software products, and does not affect Mac or Linux operating systems. Falcon is designed to protect files stored in the cloud.

CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, utilized by many Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare providers, and energy companies, detects and blocks hacking threats. This type of cybersecurity software needs extensive access to a computer’s operating system to scan for threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows are crashing because of how a software code update from CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.

The company clarified that the outage was not caused by a security incident or cyberattack. Kurtz mentioned in his post that the issue was identified, isolated, and that engineers had deployed an update to fix the problem.

CrowdStrike’s stock fell 10% in premarket trading.

 

What is CrowdStrike known for?

CrowdStrike is a massive cybersecurity company that operates globally through software sales and by investigating major hacks. The company also assists in cybersecurity investigations for the US government. For instance, CrowdStrike has tracked North Korean hackers for over a decade and was involved in tracking the groups responsible for the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures.

However, CrowdStrike is perhaps best known for investigating the Russian hack of Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 US election. Since 2016, the company has been at the center of various false conspiracy theories, especially after a White House transcript revealed that former President Donald Trump mentioned CrowdStrike in his July 2016 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

CrowdStrike was the first to publicly raise the alarm about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, a conclusion that was later confirmed by US intelligence agencies.