CrowdStrike chief executive ‘deeply sorry’ for global impact of flawed software update
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George Kurtz, the founder and chief executive of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has said the company is “deeply sorry for impact that we’ve caused to customers” after a flawed software update prompted a global IT outage.
Kurtz told NBC’s Today Show in the US that the problem was down to a bug in a single update. “We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue,” he said, adding that CrowdStrike was now “working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online”.
Kurtz said there had been a “negative interaction” between the update and Microsoft’s operating system, which had then caused computers to crash, sparking the global outage, which remains ongoing.
Asked how one faulty update could cause such global chaose, he said: “We have to go back and see what happened here, our systems are always looking for the latest attacks from adversaries that that are out there.”
He made clear that there was no possibilty it was a cyber-attack. However, although the problem had been identified and a fix issued, Kurtz said “it could be some time for some systems” to return to normal, stressing that they would not “just automatically recover”.
