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A massive global tech outage plunged airports and businesses into chaos Friday morning. It even disrupted emergency services and urgent surgeries.
The cause of the issue? A widely used cybersecurity software provider, CrowdStrike, issued a corrupted software update to its flagship product, Falcon, which is used on Microsoft’s Windows systems.
CrowdStrike’s software detects and prevents hackers from accessing its customers’ files. The Texas-based cybersecurity giant is used by the U.S. government to “stop sophisticated attacks and protect our nation’s critical infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said in a 2021 statement.
U.S. government agencies employing its software include but are not limited to the Department of Justice, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration. CrowdStrike software is also used by 127 state agencies in Wyoming to defend against cyberattacks. Overall, the firm has about 30,000 customers — most in the U.S. — and more than half of them are Fortune 500 companies. That includes major tech firms Google, Amazon, Intel, and Microsoft.
CrowdStrike’s competitors include Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler and Fortinet. Its CEO, Kurtz, formerly worked as an executive at another online security company, McAfee.
The company has been a leading voice in the ballooning cybersecurity industry as threats to governments and businesses have mounted. The company has investigated multiple high-level cybersecurity issues over the last decade. For example, it investigated North Korean hackers targeting the U.S. military operations in South Korea. Its lawyer for privacy and cyber policy, Drew Bagley, testified before Congress last year about the increasing threat of cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies and businesses from other nation-states and criminal enterprises. The firm is perhaps best known for its work with the Democratic National Convention to investigate Russias’s interference in the 2016 election. And its staffers have spoken out about the election.
The election also made CrowdStrike the subject of conspiracy theories that the firm’s investigation into Russia was meant to discredit then-President Donald Trump’s victory. Trump referenced the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory in a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that eventually helped lead to his first impeachment.
CrowdStrike has also worked with the GOP, helping the party’s House campaign arm investigate email thefts by hackers in 2018.