Crowdstrike, one month after the global crash: share price plummets and faces multi-million dollar lawsuits

On July 19, the enterprise security platform CrowdStrike suffered an outage Airports, banks and hospitals paralyzed hours from all over the world. Many computers needed for basic daily operations, From patient discharge to flight check-inthey refused to boot, looping with a blue screen Windows error. A month later, the issue has long been resolved, but the company is still far from returning to normal.

The CrowdStrike software is designed to stop threats like viruses and cyberattacks, and the glitch happened during an update of the database that the computers use to detect these issues. When they went to activate, they received an update with a bug, and they were stuck in a situation where they couldn’t complete the installation of the new version, but couldn’t go back to the previous version either. This meant the computers wouldn’t even turn on and slowed down their recovery because they couldn’t repair it remotely.

Impact, symbol calculated by Microsoft, a 8.5 million computers worldwideThis number isn’t much considering the total number of computers in use every day (less than 1%), but CrowdStrike is a popular platform among large companies. That said, this isn’t just a problem How many The computer is affected, and collectionAlthough this was an easily fixable bug, the only way to apply the necessary patch was to go to the system administrators at these companies because the machines were stuck in a loading and error loop.

Most of the affected businesses were able to resume functioning within a few hours. However, the consequences were apparent a few days later: flight delays and cancellations They complicated summer travel for days.

This means that a month after the incident, the impact is still being felt at CrowdStrike headquarters in Austin, Texas. Even Microsoft’s own short-term priorities and plans have changed.Now, the company is asking all teams to prioritize security and is considering limiting the level of access apps have to the core of the operating system.

The extent of Microsoft’s concern is not exaggerated. The outage affected only machines running the Windows operating system and has led some executives to consider adopting Mac or iPad computers from archrival Apple, or using an alternative operating system such as Linux on their machines.When was the last time you heard of Apple failing this badly?“Delta Airways President Ed Bastien said in an interview with CNBC, a North American television network.

The airline’s failure cost about $500 million Due to the knock-on effect of flight delays, it took Delta five days to get back on track. The total cost to all affected was around $5.4 billion As compensation, CrowdStrike has offered the airline the same thing it has given its other customers so far: a $10 gift card for the meal delivery service Uber Eats.

However, the decline in CrowdStrike’s stock price indicates the severity of the situation. In mid-July, the company’s stock was trading at $390 on the Nasdaq. They plummeted to $258.down nearly 34%. Delta announced the lawsuit and the stock fell again. Although it is now starting to recover – the stock price is $261, down 33% – it is still a far cry from its previous price.

Some of the company’s top executives took the stage this week at Def Con, the world’s most important digital security conference, to accept the organization’s annual “Top Failure” award. Michael Santonashe tried to take it in with humor. “We screwed up, and I want all the employees who come into the office and see this award to remember that these things shouldn’t happen,” he said.