Up until now, the company Crowdstrike was probably only known to IT experts. But now the company has caused problems worldwide due to a software glitch. What is known about the company.
At 11:45 a.m. on Friday, George Kurtz gave a slight all-clear: “The problem has been identified, isolated and a fix has been provided,” the CEO of the IT security company Crowdstrike announced on the X platform. In addition, the defect was not a security incident or cyber attack.
The effects of the “defect” are enormous: countless aircraft around the world had to remain on the ground, including in Germany, as the peak travel season had just begun. The Australian government held an emergency meeting, and in Great Britain thousands of doctors' offices and pharmacies were affected by the problem.
Crowdstrike's mission is not to provide less security, but to provide more: “Crowdstrike secures the most critical risk areas – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data – so that customers can stay one step ahead of today's attackers and prevent security breaches,” the company's website states about its mission.
The cybersecurity company was founded in 2011 by Kurtz with two partners. Kurtz is no stranger to the industry: In the 1990s, he founded the security company Foundstone, which was later acquired by the cybersecurity group McAfee. Kurtz became vice president there before leaving the company in 2011.
In 2013, the IT security company launched its first product with the protection software “Falcon”. In the following years, the IT security company received orders from the US government, among others, and supported them in uncovering major cyber attacks.
Growth is also rapid: in 2017, Crowdstrike was valued at more than a billion dollars for the first time on the stock market. Today, the company is valued at more than 80 billion dollars – despite a collapse in share price after the breakdown. Between 2021 and 2023 alone, the number of employees grew from 3,394 to 7,273.
Why the error has now had such far-reaching effects can be explained by looking at Crowdstrike's customers: The faulty “Falcon Sensor” software caused crashes on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system, which is used by about three-quarters of all computers worldwide.
