George Kurtz, the CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, looked visibly nervous and choked on his words when asked how a single update could cause so much disruption across the world.
A botched software update from CrowdStrike brought the world to a grinding halt on Friday, crashing countless Microsoft Windows computer systems and disrupting air travel, banking, stock markets, and more.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz shared a statement saying a single update caused the outage. He looked visibly nervous when questioned about this statement as he appeared on NBC’s Today TV show hours after the outage.
“According to your statement, it was a single content update that has managed to shut down air travel, credit card payment systems, banks, broadcast, street lights, 911, emergency around the globe. Why is there not some kind of redundancy or some sort of backup? How is it that one single software bug can have such a profound and immediate impact?” the interviewer asked Kurtz.
The CEO of CrowdStrike stammered and had to take a drink of water before he could form a full sentence. A video of the moment has gone massively viral online, collecting millions of views on the social media platform X.
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{{/usCountry}}The CEO of CrowdStrike stammered and had to take a drink of water before he could form a full sentence. A video of the moment has gone massively viral online, collecting millions of views on the social media platform X.
Take a look at the video below:
{{/usCountry}}Security experts said CrowdStrike's routine update of its widely used cybersecurity software, which caused clients' computer systems to crash globally on Friday, apparently did not undergo adequate quality checks before it was deployed.
The latest version of its Falcon Sensor software was meant make CrowdStrike clients' systems more secure against hacking by updating the threats it defends against. But faulty code in the update files resulted in one of the most widespread tech outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft's Windows operating system, news agency Reuters reported.
CrowdStrike has since fixed the problem on their end.
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.