What is CrowdStrike, the company linked to the global outage?
Jul 19, 2024, 6:55 AM
In this photo illustration a Crowdstrike logo seen displayed on a smartphone. The global computer outage affecting airports, banks and other businesses appears to stem at least partly from a software update issued by major U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN. (Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
(Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
The global computer outage affecting airports, banks and other businesses on Friday appears to stem at least partly from a software update issued by major U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN.
CrowdStrike told customers early Friday that the outages were caused by “a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems, according to a post on X from CEO George Kurtz.
The company’s engineers took action to address the problem, according to an advisory viewed by CNN, which told customers to reboot their computers and perform other actions if they were still having technical issues. The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and is not impacting Mac or Linux operating systems, according to the advisory. Crowdstrike says Falcon is designed to protect files saved in the cloud.
CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.
The company said the outage was not caused by a security incident or a cyberattack. Kurtz, in his post, said the issue was identified and isolated, and engineers deployed an update to fix the problem.
CrowdStrike’s (CRWD) stock fell 10% in premarket trading.
What is CrowdStrike known for?
The massive cybersecurity company does business around the world through software sales and investigations of major hacks.
The company also helps run cybersecurity investigations for the U.S. government. For example, CrowdStrike has tracked North Korean hackers for more than a decade, the company says. It also was tasked with tracking the hacking groups that carried out the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures.
But CrowdStrike is perhaps best known for investigating the Russian hack of Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 U.S. election. It has been at the center of false conspiracy theories since 2016, most notably after a White House transcript revealed former President Donald Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in his July 2016 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment.
CrowdStrike was the first to publicly sound the alarm about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and CrowdStrike’s assessment was later confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies.
