Crowdstrike CEO on when global IT outage will end: ‘Sorry, will take time’

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz attributes a global IT outage to a faulty content update, apologizes for disruptions, and assures that the issue has been fixed.

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed that the recent global IT outage was caused by a single faulty content update. Apologizing for the tech glitch that resulted in major disruptions across banks, stock markets, supermarkets, airports, and various other sectors worldwide, he said, “We’re deeply sorry.”

Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity service aimed at preventing internet breaches or hacks for the world’s biggest companies, quickly identified and addressed the problem. “That update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” Kurtz explained, adding that the company has since fixed the issue. “We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue.”

Kurtz emphasized the need to investigate the incident further, stating, “We have to go back and see what happened here. Our systems are always looking for the latest attacks from adversaries that are out there.”

When asked if it was a cyberattack, he clarified, “It wasn’t a cyberattack. It was related to this content update.”

Kurtz also mentioned that he and his team had “a long night,” but systems had been fixed on their end. He cautioned that it might take some time for everything to return to normal, saying, “So, it could be some time for some systems, it [won’t] just automatically recover. But it’s our mission… to make sure that every customer is fully recovered.”

Earlier, the IT security firm stated that it had identified the issue, isolated it, and deployed a fix. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed,” the company said.