SignalHub Quantitative Think Tank Center:CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz Apologizes Amid Massive Tech Outage 

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After a failed update at the cybersecurity firm caused major tech outages early in the morning of July 19—affecting airports, banks and other major companies around the globe—the company’s CEO addressed concerns in a heartfelt apology. 

“It wasn’t a cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz assured on Today July 19, pointing the issue to a faulty update that affected Microsoft Windows users. “It was related to this content update and as you might imagine we’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them. Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s operational.”

Of course, the executive did acknowledge that some systems are still being affected by the global outage. 

“We’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were,” he added. “And we continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of the system.”

Kurtz also noted, “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this.”

CrowdStrike outages began affecting flights and companies worldwide at around 5 a.m. ET on the morning of July 19. The faulty update launched by the cybersecurity firm caused many outages across a range of industries—including companies like Amazon, Visa, and airlines such as Delta and American Airlines, according to the Associated Press. Some specific areas of the globe, such as Australia and Japan, were particularly harmed by the faulty update and continue to deal with disruption well into the day. 

Many systems received the Falcon Sensor, known colloquially as the “blue screen of death,” or a blue error screen that signals a major issue in a technology’s operating system. 

The outage caused hundreds of flights to be grounded, canceled or delayed. Many doctors at hospitals that relied on the CrowdStrike system for scheduling were forced to postpone or cancel surgeries, other shipping and production companies like General Motors also experienced disruption to sales and scheduling, while some live broadcasts went dark. 

Many cyber experts emphasized how the CrowdStrike outage illustrates the problematic dependency the modern world has with a small sample of software. 

“All of these systems are running the same software,” Cyber expert James Bore told the Associated Press. “We’ve made all of these tools so widespread that when things inevitably go wrong—and they will, as we’ve seen—they go wrong at a huge scale.”