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Crowdstrike CEO issues apology for 'mother of all outages' - but admits it could be hours before systems are back online
CrowdStrike has issued an apology after it caused worldwide chaos Friday after it deployed a faulty update to its software that caused a Microsoft outage.
The cybersecurity firm's CEO, George Kurtz, spoke publicly about six hours after systems went down, saying the 'blues-screen of death' was caused by a software bug.
'We are deeply sorry for the impact that we have caused to our customers, to travelers, to anyone who has been affected by this, including our company,' Kurtz said in an interview with NBC’s 'Today.'
He also vowed to work with each customer individually as they work to get their operations back online, which could take hours.
The cybersecurity firm's CEO, George Kurtz, spoke publicly about six hours after systems when down, saying the 'blues-screen of death' was caused by a software bug
'Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it's coming up and it'll be operational,' Kurtz said.
'It could be some time for some systems that won't automatically recover,' he added, but the company 'would make sure every customer is fully recovered.'
Americans woke up to the news of the 'mother of all outages,' finding computers running on Windows were stuck on a blue screen with the error message 'DRIVER_OVERRAN_STACK_BUFFER.'
However, CrowdStrike's bug also took out banks, airlines, television networks, trains and healthcare systems.
Images and footage of airports across the nation showed weary travelers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would take off.
And many hospitals have canceled all Friday appointments due to their networks crashing.
'When you look at the software it is as a very complex world and there's a lot of interactions and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task,' Kurtz told Today.
'So these sort of things, obviously you know you try to understand and mitigate them and in some cases, you have a weird interaction and it didn't seem like it happened on every Windows system there's different versions and flavors and patch levels.
Images and footage of airports across the nation showed weary travelers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would take off. Pictured are people waiting at JFK airport in New York
'We're just trying to sort out where that negative interaction was um and again that's what we're focused on getting customers back up and running.'
Kurtz was asked how one single software bug could have such a major and immediate impact.
The CEO began to choke up, appearing nervous following the question, saying the update went out and now the team needs to 'go back and see what happened.'
Kurtz posted on X around 5:30am ET that CrowdStrike had issued a fix for the default, but did not provide a time for when America will be back online and operational.
'As you might imagine, we've been on with our customers all night,' he said. 'Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it's coming up operational because we fixed it on our end.'
'It could be some time,' he added. 'Sometimes, some systems won't automatically recover… we're not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.'
The defect was uploaded to CrowdStrike's 'Falcon Sensor' software, which analyzes connections to and from the internet to determine if there is malicious behavior.
Kurtz apology on Today, however, came after the CEO shared a post on X detailing the company had deployed a fix.
The messages sparked an uproar among the public who cited the CEO's lack of instructions and 'poor communications' about the 'mother of all outages.'
User 'Tara T' posted: 'This is the CEO of CrowdStrike. Notice the distinct lack of apology or acknowledgment that they've done anything wrong, even though millions of people are impacted by this.'
Many other X users claimed that 'CrowdStrike owes every IT department impacted by this some serious sloppy in apology.'