CrowdStrike was not hacked

Now that was a classic case of commentators curse!. After writing a very positive piece about what a great company CrowdStrike is, that very same morning, they became the face of the biggest IT failure in history. Ouch, terrible timing.

The good news is that CrowdStrike was not hacked. A cybersecurity company being hacked would be disastrous for their reputation. Instead, it was an internal glitch that had a direct impact on most corporate clients that run Microsoft operating system software. As you can guess, there are many such clients. It is estimated that 8.5 million Windows machines were impacted.

Founder and CEO George Kurtz (pictured below looking shattered) responded quickly, professionally and directly. He appeared on multiple news channels, doing countless interviews, explaining what had happened.

Our advice is to hold. They may lose a few clients to competitors and there could be some lawsuits due to lost revenues. The airlines for example are not happy. But we still believe this a great business with strong long-term prospects. Companies are made up of people and people make mistakes. We are not the type of shareholders to sell a stock after one glitch.

On the plus side, management's reaction has been well received, and now the whole world knows the CrowdStrike name. As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity, although I am sure they would have preferred this not to have happened.