Crowdstrike CEO ‘Deeply Sorry’ For Global IT Outage

The head of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike has publicly apologised on Friday for the massive IT outage that badly impacted online services around the world.

The Friday outage resulted in problems at major banks, media outlets, airlines and countless businesses, after problems with certain versions of Microsoft’s operating system and products caused blue screens of death.

The IT chaos triggered crisis meetings by government officials around the world, and in America alone caused 1,200 US flights to be cancelled, disrupted some 911 services, and even impacted the operation of street lights.

Largest ever failure?

The impact around the world has been equally severe, with critical infrastructure, global trading systems, doctor booking systems and media broadcasting among a few of the typical systems affected.

Indeed, so widespread was the outage that some have labelled it as the largest ever IT failure.

Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been resolved.

It emerged that a software update to Crowdstrike’s Falcon tool had caused the issue with Microsoft Windows operating system.

The Falcon tool identifies unusual behaviour and vulnerabilities to protect computer systems from threats such as malware.

The affected Windows PCs and servers were knocked offline, and forced into a recovery boot loop which saw machines unable to restart properly.

Public apology

Now the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, has said he is “deeply sorry” for the outage and has vowed to work with all of its customers as they work to get their operations back online.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he told NBC News’ ‘Today’ program.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz was quoted as saying. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover,” he added, but the company “would make sure every customer is fully recovered.”

A Sky News video of the NBC News interview can be found here.