Friday's CrowdStrike outage marks the second major tech collapse involving founder and CEO George Kurtz, who also served as McAfee's chief technology officer in 2010 when a security update for the antivirus company crashed tens of thousands of computers.
On Friday, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released a flawed software update that crippled thousands of Microsoft Windows computers around the world and brought many services to a screeching halt. Air travel, credit card payments, emergency services, the stock market and many other services were affected by the Microsoft outage linked to the disastrous CrowdStrike software update.
NewsByte said the incident was reminiscent of antivirus company McAfee's 2010 gaffe, when the company accidentally shut down Windows XP PCs around the world.
People were even more surprised to learn that CrowdStrike's billionaire founder and CEO, George Kurtz, served as McAfee's CTO in 2010.
X's post, in which he talked about Kurz's involvement in two major technology blunders, has been viewed more than 1.6 million times and gone viral.
Meanwhile, Kurtz's personal wealth fell by more than $300 million on Friday because of the faulty update. Forbes magazine said he was worth $3.2 billion on Thursday, but his net worth has fallen to $2.9 billion as CrowdStrike shares plummeted 11% on Friday.
A global IT outage on Friday was linked to a single update that was automatically applied to Crowdstrike Falcon, a cybersecurity tool used primarily by large companies, which crashed Microsoft Windows computers around the world.
In a statement, Kurtz apologized for the outage and said the issue had been identified and a fix had been distributed. “The outage was caused by a flaw found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. This is not a cyberattack,” he clarified.
