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CrowdStrike Breach & Portfolio Update (New Position)
Brad Freeman
July 19, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Table of Contents
1. CrowdStrike News
Early this morning, train stations, airports, hospitals and stores across the globe experienced a software outage. Sky News has been off-air all day, 1,300 flights have been canceled and some general surgeries have been postponed. Emergency services in the UK were even down for a bit. This was CrowdStrike’s fault. The company pushed an update to its systems today, which contained a defect that led to the outages for Windows-based devices. A fix is in place, many customers are again up and running, and many more aren’t. This will likely take a few days to be entirely resolved, and is considered one of the most broad-based, global IT incidents in recent memory.
All of this sounds bad, but there are a few other things to mention. First, this was not a security breach. This was a defect anomaly in a software update. It’s not a good look, but it does not offer evidence of any vulnerability within CrowdStrike’s core technology. Just really bad press and annoyed people. Next, the response from CrowdStrike has been quite brisk, with the CEO also going on NBC today to apologize for the mistake and remediation commencing. No software company is perfect. CrowdStrike’s massive reach, endpoint niche and mission-critical products make any of its mistakes more visible than for other players, but all of these companies stub their toes sometimes. Considering CrowdStrike’s customers are large enterprises on long term contracts (and that there was no security breach), I don’t see this impacting churn levels or pricing power. Still, it could be a small boost to SentinelOne and others in future competitive bidding environments.
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