What Is CrowdStrike, the Cybersecurity Company Behind the Global Tech Chaos?

Late last two Thursday night on the U.S. East Coast, reports began trickling out that PC-based systems were not functioning. Flights were grounded, the U.K. health system had to pause certain operations, and emergency services were cut off. Around the globe, people experienced what's known as the blue screen of death, a dreaded error message against a blue background indicating the system was not functioning. It soon became clear that there was an issue with an update to CrowdStrike cybersecurity software for Windows users. CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz posted on X early Friday morning that it was not a cyberattack and that "the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed." Soon after, a visibly tired Kurtz appeared on Today to say he was "deeply sorry" for the disruptions and that the company was working with clients to get systems back online. Host Hoda Kotb noted that computers at NBC's studios had been affected. Austin-based CrowdStrike was founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 2012 by Kurtz, Gregg Marston, and Dimitri Alperovich. Kurtz and Alperovich had previously worked together at antivirus software company McAfee; Marston had been CFO of Foundstone, an IT company Kurtz co-founded that McAfee acquired. At the time, cybersecurity software was focused on detecting viruses and malware, but CrowdStrike's founders took the then-novel approach of tracking the hackers behind the intrusions. Their system was "based on robust machine-learning infrastructure and artificial intelligence that looks for behavioral attack patterns and indicators of attack to identify bad actors," Kurtz told Inc. in 2016. Systems like McAfee's were also slow because the software scanned a person's machine each time they turned on the computer -- a process that could take 15 minutes. CrowdStrike's system was cloud-based, meaning it was "lightweight and nimble" and didn't slow down a user's computer, Kurtz said. Today, CrowdStrike's signature product is the cloud-based Falcon platform that works across a company's IT systems and continuously monitors for threats such as malware or unauthorized access. "Always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task," Kurtz said on Today. To respond to new threats, CrowdStrike regularly sends out software updates. Clearly, something went awry in the most recent update -- it was a "weird interaction" with Windows systems as Kurtz called it. Mac and Linux users were not affected. CrowdStrike was No. 144 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in America in 2016, and appeared on Inc.'s list of the best-led companies in America in 2021. It went public on Nasdaq in 2019. Major corporations and governments often call in CrowdStrike for incident response after they've been hacked. The company made headlines when it was tapped to investigate the hacks of Sony Pictures in 2014 and the Democratic National Committee in 2016. By mid-morning on Friday, systems were coming back online, but the reputational damage to CrowdStrike may be hard to shake. The incident raises questions about how a routine software update could cause so much havoc. "This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world's core internet infrastructure," Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of Britain's National Cyber Security Center, told The New York Times.