CrowdStrike’s shares fell a further 13% on Monday 22nd July 2024 while the cybersecurity software firm attempted to help clients from various sectors to recover from an outage that disrupted millions of Microsoft Windows devices on Friday 19th July 2024.
CrowdStrike 5-day share price chart
Early Friday, the company released a flawed update to its Falcon vulnerability-protection software, leading to crashes in PC’s, data centre servers, and networked display screens.
This caused flights to be grounded and medical appointments to be cancelled among numerous other ‘knock-on’ problems world-wide. Microsoft reported that the incident affected 8.5 million Windows devices, which is less than 1% of the global total.
IT staff swiftly acted to repair computers. At the same time, hackers attempted to exploit the turmoil by creating malicious websites that seemed to provide software updates.
See CrowdStrike website for more details about this issue.
Chief security officer Shawn Henry said the incident had been a “gut punch” for the firm, which had previously been one of the most trusted names in the industry.
“We let down the very people we committed to protect, and to say we’re devastated is a huge understatement,“ he reportedly said.
Mr Henry, a former FBI executive assistant director, reportedly said the weekend had been “the most challenging 48 hours” of his 12 years at the company. He promised it would use the incident as an opportunity to “emerge better and stronger than ever”.
“The confidence we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets within hours, and it was a gut punch,” he said in a LinkedIn post, on Monday 22nd July 2024.
“But this pales in comparison to the pain we’ve caused our customers and our partners.”