What is CrowdStrike and why is it the villain of the global blackout

The American cybersecurity company was in the eye of the hurricane all these hours. Crowdstrikeall for major global power outage what has affected thousands of services and this paralysed the activities of airports, banks, supermarkets, hospitals, and radio and television stations.

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said the issues were caused by “defect” in “content update” for Microsoft Windows devices.

“Crowdstrike is actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in unique content of a Windows server update.”

He expressed it Mac and Linux servers are not affected. and assured that the incident was not related to security or a cyber attack.

“The issue was identified, isolated and corrected,” he added.

What is Crowdstrike

CrowdStrike was founded 13 years ago and has been listed on the US stock exchange since 2019. The company, founded by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, is based in Austin, Texas and employs more than 85,000 people and has more than 24,000 customers worldwide, mostly enterprises and institutions.

The company focuses on endpoint protection to prevent malware attacks on corporate networks through connected devices such as mobile phones and laptops.

Likewise, it seeks to protect data that companies have moved from their own servers to so-called cloud servers.

She has been involved in investigations into several high-profile cyber attacks, such as cWhen Sony Pictures suffered a hack of its computer systems in 2014.

In 2016, the Democratic National Committee, the strategic arm of the Democratic Party, turned to Crowdstrike to investigate a breach of its computer network.

BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam comments that Crowdstrike lost a fifth of its value on the US stock market on Friday.

If this is confirmed, the company will register when the markets open. a loss of $16 billion in value in one day.