‘I got fired from CrowdStrike,' Indian-origin man ‘not really sure’ why he was sacked: Another employee meme?
Amid the swirling torrent of “CrowdStrike employee” memes on social media, an Indian-origin man with a Computer Science background says he was fired.
As “Blue Screens of Death” flashed across the world on Friday following a Microsoft outage afflicting banks, airlines and other operations on the globe, a US-based cybersecurity firm eventually took the fall for the IT lockdown.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, CrowdStrike claimed responsibility in an update shared on Friday afternoon. The agency's CEO, George Kurtz, shortly issued a statement on social media, saying the supposed IT pandemic was connected to a "defect found in a single content update for Window hosts” and not an issue of “a security incident or cyberattack.” What more was to be said? As soon he firmly established that the issue bore no roots in any ill will but was merely the result of a corrupted update their company pushed, the social media erupted into a meme-worthy frenzy.
CrowdStrike employee memes erupt online
Numerous individuals came forward, claiming responsibility for the global IT crisis. And what more was expected to happen, especially when people love to put a face to something of such grand proportions plaguing them from an elusive distance? They all got the platform and audience they were looking for. Riotous fake posts and trolling memes about “former CrowdStrike employees” being sacked made it to the internet.
All was fun and games until a man in the flesh arose out of the background, again allegedly confessing that he had been laid off from the company amid the ongoing hour of crisis, which somehow also apparently translated into his personal life after that—reasons: unknown.
An Indian-origin man named Vinu Sankar Sadasivan (@imVinusankars) took to his X/Twitter feed on Saturday and wrote: “I got fired from CrowdStrike today :("
Further highlighting that he had no comprehension of why he was let go by the company, he added, “I am not really sure what the reason was! Anyway, I'll be around in Vienna for #ICML2024 since I'm free now.
Let me know if anyone interested in Security and Privacy in AI or any other topic broadly in deep learning would like to catch up.”
Indian-origin man, another possible addition to the ongoing meme series
Unlike the previous meme fest, Sadasivan’s confession seemed genuine. But is it? Although his X bio lays out an impressive list of achievements, mapping out a qualified trajectory in the tech industry, nowhere does it announce his employment at CrowdStrike.
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As long as his self-introduction on X and his GitHub profile tracks, Sadasivan hails from the town of Kollam in Kerala, India, and is a third-year Computer Science PhD student at The University of Maryland, College Park. A recipient of the Kulkarni Fellowship 2023, his research expertise lies in the areas of Security and Privacy in AI.
His past milestones include being awarded the Director’s Silver Medal and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Gandhinagar in 2020. The man claiming to be a former employee at CrowdStrike has reportedly previously interned at Caltech, Microsoft Research India and IISc. Yet again, no CrowdStrike mention to be seen anywhere, not even on his readily available online meticulous CV.
His co-authored research paper titled “Fast Adversarial Attacks on Language Models In One GPU Minute” appears to have been accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), held in Vienna, Austria, on July 21, 2024. Considering he had enough time to get fired from CrowdStrike while landing his big moment at the conference in Vienna, you can just go right up to him at the venue, as also highlighted in his tweet, and confirm if his claims of being a former employee at cybersecurity firm have a sound foundation bearing truthful fruits. If not, we can add him to the list of “the best CrowdStrike employee memes.”
Several netizens joined in to console him and even help out in ways they could. Still, not everyone believed his outcry, given how the whole scenario has started sharing an uncanny resemblance with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
An X user summed up it accurately: “At this point sarcasm and reality are indistinguishable 😂”