CrowdStrike Coming Away A ‘Stronger Company’ After Global Outage: CEO George Kurtz
When it comes to the channel, ‘I think even our relationships with our partners are stronger because of this,’ Kurtz says during a CRN interview Tuesday.
The massive global outage in July caused by a CrowdStrike update has ultimately “helped transform” the company, which should put the cybersecurity vendor in an even better position to work with partners in protecting customers against intensifying cyberthreats, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Tuesday.
The defective content update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform on July 19 led to a “blue screen of death” scenario for 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices, causing widespread disruptions to global air travel, health care and business for several days.
To a large degree, the recovery process was made possible by the rapid response of many solution and service provider partners, Kurtz said in response to questions from CRN editors during the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference.
“It was an event that helped transform the company. I think we’ll possibly come out of it a stronger company. And I think even our relationships with our partners are stronger because of this,” he said during the conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company in Atlanta. “I think when you hit some adversity, that’s really when you see the level of partnership, the engagement and the commitment that partners and customers have with CrowdStrike.”
For VirtuIT Systems, a solution and service provider partner of CrowdStrike based in Nanuet, N.Y., customers remain committed to the security vendor due to its highly regarded technology and track record, according to VirtuIT CEO Gary McConnell.
“If you look at the technology, it's really solid,” McConnell said. “It will be remembered as just a blip in the radar. A very expensive one. But CrowdStrike, I think, is here to stay, and customers love the product.”
Customers, he noted, have understood that even though they experienced downtime because of the CrowdStrike-caused incident, it wasn’t the result of a breach, which would’ve been far more troubling.
“I don't want to say CrowdStrike gets a pass for the issue,” he said, “but it wasn't a security breach.”
Likewise, for Imperium Data, a CrowdStrike partner and No. 448 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 for 2024, “a lot of our clients were very loyal to CrowdStrike, even after what happened,” said CEO Nicholas Scarsella.
Tampa, Fla.-based Imperium was able to complete recovery work with most customers within a day after the incident, and the ultimate damage was “minimal” to the solution provider’s client base, Scarsella said.
Still, some customers have expressed interest in exploring alternatives to CrowdStrike after the outage, and in all likelihood there will continue to be “real competition” from other vendors for such customers, he noted.
Particularly for the IT teams that dealt with major challenges in responding to the outage, “there's some hurt feelings over that,” Scarsella said.
Looking ahead, “what we would be looking for [from CrowdStrike] is ideas and/or marketing to help repair some of those trust issues with customers,” he said.
Improving Windows Resiliency
In terms of the technical changes CrowdStrike has made following the outage, the vendor has implemented additional testing and is now deploying staged rollouts of updates to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future.
In particular, the vendor has overhauled its approach to deploying threat-related content updates that impact the Windows kernel, to ensure that even these routine configuration changes go through rigorous testing and staging, a CrowdStrike executive said during congressional testimony in September.
Meanwhile, when asked Tuesday about CrowdStrike’s increased collaboration with Microsoft in the wake of the outage, Kurtz said that the companies are in fact aiming to make Windows more resilient going forward. “I think that's the goal,” he said.
At the same time, however, “part of the ecosystem challenge really is that Microsoft is open. You've got literally thousands and thousands of drivers and companies that work in this protected mode,” Kurtz said. “This isn't just a security discussion.”
CrowdStrike also continues to contend that it has the “best architecture” of major cybersecurity vendors, something that isn’t tainted by the bug in the vendor’s validation process that led to the July outage, he said.
Ultimately, in the wake of the incident, “there's a lot of noise, and I think candidly, a lot of competitors trying to take advantage of a situation that we had,” Kurtz said. “But I think customers see through a lot of the misinformation and it's backfired in many cases.”