CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas accepts ‘biggest failure’ award following Microsoft global IT outage

Last month’s CrowdStrike-Microsoft IT outage crippled airlines and other industries around the world [File]
| Image source: Reuters

CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas accepted the “Most Epic Failure” award at this year’s Pwnie Awards event at DEF CON 32 in Las Vegas for a botched update at his cybersecurity company in July that led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of computers. The Microsoft outage paralyzed airlines, payment systems, hospitals and other industries around the world.

The Pwnie Awards is an annual event that aims to “celebrate and laugh at the achievements and failures of security researchers and the broader security community,” according to its official X account.

The notice on the Pwnie Awards website reads in part: “This award will recognize a critical failure by an individual or corporate entity – a failure that would bring down the entire information security industry. It could be a single incident, marketing campaign, or investment – or a series of egregious failures.”

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Video footage from the event showed Sentonas cheerfully accepting the large prize, acknowledging CrowdStrike’s mistakes and promising to do better. The Pwnie Award also encourages users to show empathy for company employees.

“We made terrible mistakes,” Santonas said, adding that he would display the trophy where CrowdStrike employees could see it.

“… You know, our goal was to protect people, and we got it wrong. I want to make sure everybody understands that these things can’t happen, and that’s what this community is about,” Santonas told a crowd of technicians as he accepted the award.

The faulty update released by CrowdStrike on July 18/19 affected people from Australia to India and the UK to the US, causing thousands of flights to be delayed or cancelled, airports to switch to manual check-in processes, digital transactions to fail, and patients to face delayed treatment.

Many key businesses were affected. Delta Air Lines even threatened legal action to recoup millions of dollars in losses The company said it took the loss.

CrowdStrike is also facing scrutiny from the U.S. government over the massive outage, which affected more than 8 million devices. Regulators have also raised antitrust concerns.

CrowdStrike has also been hit with a shareholder lawsuit, and its stock price has fallen more than 34% in the past month.