CrowdStrike CEO: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack”

Meanwhile, shares in cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings were plummeting on Friday morning amid the company being linked to a massive global tech outage.

CrowdStrike is a US cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas that provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyber attack response services.

A security update that the company ran on Friday is being blamed for impacting thousands of Microsoft Windows machines with the so-called “Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)”. Because CrowdStrike’s software is used by a variety of major global airports, banks, retailers and stock exchanges; the impact of this outage is subsequently severe and widespread.

Berlin and Hong Kong airports were facing major disruptions on Friday morning, while Air India, Indigo and Spicejet were also facing major delays. LSEG Group’s Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage on Friday that affected user access worldwide, causing disruption across financial markets. Meanwhile, Capitec, one of South Africa’s largest banks by consumers, experienced downtime at its ATMs across the country.

The news immediately affected CrowdStrike Holdings’ share price, which fell over 3 per cent in trade on the NASDAQ to just over $344 per share.

In a previous statement, CrowdStrike said that it is “aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor”.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon offering analyses connections to and from the internet to determine if there is malicious behaviour. The data is used to help detect and prevent malicious actions involving websites.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s share price was only marginally down on Friday by 0.71 per cent on the NASDAQ.