Global outage due to Friday’s release of CrowdStrike

[jasonX]

The world is still reeling from the massive tech failure that has caused travel chaos around the world, from banking to healthcare services, the world was hit badly. 

Flights have been grounded because of the IT outage - a flaw which left many computers displaying blue error screens.

Everywhere around the globe, images are pouring showing long queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports around the world, as passengers had to be manually checked in. Some, because of the turmoil and frustrations just slept on the floor!
 

Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has admitted that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.

Microsoft has said, it is taking "mitigation action" to deal with "the lingering impact" of the outage. The costs from the global outage could easily top $1 billion – BUT the question is WHO PAYS and HOW will they pay (IF they will pay that is...). That is the harder thing to understand there. 

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in an interview Friday morning on CNBC that the firm has been focused on fixing the continuing problems and that so far, he believed most customers had been understanding.

“My goal right now is to make sure every customer is back up and running,” he said. “I think many of the customers understand it’s a complex environment and staying one step ahead of the bad guys requires these content updates.”

"Businesses affected by the outage are likely to find out that traditional business interruption insurance won’t cover them for any of their losses,' said Mark Friedlander, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute. 

"Those policies typically require there to be some kind of physical damage to a business’ property in order for claims to be paid. There is a separate kind of policy for computer outages, known as Business Network Interruption policies, under which claims might be paid. But those polices sometimes only cover malicious hacks and exclude non-malicious computer problems like this one, he said."

Will customers stay?
It’s also not clear how many customers CrowdStrike might lose because of Friday. Wedbush Securities’ Ives estimates less than 5% of its customers might go elsewhere.

“They’re such an entrenched player, to move away from CrowdStrike would be a gamble,” he said. It will be difficult, and not without additional costs, for many customers to switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. But the real hit to CrowdStrike could be reputational damage that will make it difficult to win new customers.


About CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike has redefined security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise. CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today’s adversaries and stop breaches. Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities – all through a single, lightweight agent. With CrowdStrike, customers benefit from superior protection, better performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms reveals the relative position of technology providers for a market, helping you make the right choice for your organization. Among 15 other recognized vendors, CrowdStrike was recognized as a Leader positioned highest in Ability to Execute and furthest right in Vision.



For more information, visit the SOURCE sites below. 
 

CrowdStrike and Microsoft: What we know about global IT outage

Costs from the global outage could top $1 billion – but who pays the bill is harder to understand

Competitors and Alternatives to CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike Home Page

Images and content from SOURCEs as identified