Friday’s CrowdStrike outage is the second major tech meltdown that founder and CEO George Kurtz has been involved in. He was also the Chief Technology Officer of McAfee in 2010, when a security update from the antivirus firm crashed tens of thousands of computers.
On Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike pushed a faulty software update that bricked thousands of Microsoft Windows computers across the world and brought many services to a screeching halt. Air travel, credit card payments, emergency services, stock markets and much more were affected by the Microsoft outage linked to the disastrous CrowdStrike software update.
It reminded some people of the McAfee blunder of 2010 when the antivirus firm inadvertently triggered a worldwide shutdown of Windows XP PCs across the world, according to NewsByte.
People were even more surprised to discover that CrowdStrike’s billionaire founder and CEO George Kurtz served as the CTO of McAfee in 2010.
A post on X speaking about Kurtz’s involvement in two major tech bungles has gone viral with over 1.6 million views.
{{/usCountry}}A post on X speaking about Kurtz’s involvement in two major tech bungles has gone viral with over 1.6 million views.
{{/usCountry}}Meanwhile, Kurtz’s personal net worth plunged more than $300 million on Friday because of the faulty update. According to Forbes, he was worth $3.2 billion on Thursday, but his net worth went down to $2.9 billion Friday as CrowdStrike stock plunged 11%.
(Also read: CrowdStrike CEO panics, begins to choke when asked how single update caused such chaos. Viral video)
The global IT outage on Friday was linked to a single update automatically rolled out to Crowdstrike Falcon, a ubiquitous cyber security tool used primarily by large organisations. This caused Microsoft Windows computers around the world to crash.
In a statement, Kurtz apologised for the outage and said the issue had been identified and a fix deployed. “The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack,” he clarified.