The CEO of Crowdstrike, George Kurtz, was the CTO of McAfee back in 2010 when it sent out a bad update and caused similar issues worldwide.
If at first you don't succeed, .... ;-) j/k
I bet they don't even lose a meaningful amount of customers. Switching costs are too high.
A real shame, and a good reminder that we don't own the things we think we own.
I've been out of IT proper for a while, so to me, I had to ask "the Russiagate guys are selling AV software now?"
When a company makes major headlines for bad news like this investors almost always over react and drive the price too far down.
They just made thousands of IT people physically visit machines to fix them. Then all the other IT people watched that happen globally. CTOs got angry emails from other C-levels and VPs. Real money was lost. Nobody is recommending this company for a while.
It may put a dent in Microsoft as splash damage.
That said, I don't gamble against trading algorithms these days and am only guessing at what I think will happen. Anyone passing by, please don't take random online posts as financial advice.
The stock market is unrelated to reality.
I have a feeling that Microsoft's PR team will be able to navigate this successfully and Microsoft might even benefit from this incident as it tries to pull customers away from CrowdStrike Falcon and into its own EDR product -- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.
Edited to add: I wonder what the economic fallout from this will be? 10x his monetary worth? 100x? (not trying to put a price on the people who will die because of the outage; for that he and everyone involved needs to go to jail)
He will be the guy that convinced the investors and stakeholders to pour more money into the company despite some world-wide incident.
He deserves at least 3x the pay.
PS: look at the stocks! They sank, and now they are gaining again value. People can't work, people die, flights get delayed/canceled because of their software.
"We have unit tests coverage of 99%".
Let's be honest. :)
I gave it this question and part of the steps included deploying to avoid peak hours to avoid potential disruptions (such as the weekend for businesses); including a way to detect deployment issues and easily rollback the software in case there is an issue; and testing the deployment in a controlled environment before rolling it out to all customers (this would include doing a small rollout before a larger one). All of these actions are very standard and all would have greatly helped in this situation.
My suspicion, as someone pointed out, is that they deployed this update as a small patch, maybe bypassing some controls and cutting some corners. I really wouldn't blame it on lack of automated tests, etc. Only crowdstrike people know how this thing possibly made it to production.
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IT is always considered a cost until execs realize its critical to the company's existence. Keeping the lights on always seems to be undervalued. :(
Indeed. Or in the case of crowdstrike, should exist. Which clearly doesn't for them.
They are completely incompetent because for something as critical as crowdstrike code, you must build so many layers of validation that one, two or three mistakes don't matter because they will be caught before the code ends up in a customer system.
Looks like they have so little validation that one mistake (which is by itself totally normal) can end up bricking large parts of the economy without ever being caught. Which is neither normal nor competent.
Took out the entire company where I worked.
People thought it was a worm/virus — few minutes after plugging in laptop, McAfee got the DAT update, quarantined the file; which caused Windows to start countdown+reboot (leading to endless BSODs).
- GWB