CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, is linked to the Microsoft Outage affecting Airlines companiesbanks and other businesses around the world on Friday.
The company provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices, and many industries around the world, from banking to retail to healthcare, use the company’s software to protect against breaches and hackers.
Friday’s outages were related to “a flaw detected in a unique content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement. The issue was “not a security incident or cyberattack,” he said, and Mac and Linux hosts were not affected.
“It’s incredible that a security update can have such a ripple effect, but it shows how interconnected and fragile much of the technology infrastructure used around the world is,” New York Times technology correspondent Adam Satariano said Friday on “CBS Mornings.”
CNBC’s Jim Cramer said in an interview with CrowdStrike’s Kurtz on Friday that the company has an “outstanding reputation.” Founded in 2011, it operates in more than 170 countries, has about 29,000 customers and had revenue of more than $900 million for the quarter that ended in April, according to Reuters.
CrowdStrike doesn’t just provide security software to industries, but also investigates hacks and tracks hackers. The company describes itself as “a leader in protecting customers around the world from cyber threats” and said, “It’s common for organizations to hire third-party industry experts, like CrowdStrike, to investigate and remediate cyberattacks when they suspect a breach, even as they work with law enforcement.”
The company investigated the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016 and says it has also tracked North Korean hackers for years.
When CBS News called CrowdStrike’s technical support line on Friday, a prerecorded message said the company was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft systems related to its Falcon Sensor software.
Kurtz said Friday that a patch has been deployed to resolve the issue. And in an interview with CNBC’s Cramer, he apologized to all organizations, individuals and groups affected by the issue.
“This was not a code update,” Kurtz said. “This was actually a content update. What that means is that there is a single file that generates additional logic for how we look for bad actors, and that logic was deployed and caused an issue only in the Microsoft environment specific to this bug that we had.”
“We identified this issue very quickly and rolled back that particular content file,” he said.
He said many systems can be rebooted “and the problem goes away and is fixed,” while other systems will take longer to recover — “hours” or “a little longer.”
“We work individually with each customer to make sure we can get them up and running,” Kurtz said.
The company’s shares were down 12.6% in premarket trading.
