CrowdStrike’s Stock Plummets After Outage But Is Rebounding
Following a CrowdStrike error that caused global IT problems for millions of people, CrowdStrike’s stock is not showing signs of being impacted.
Despite a massive defective software incident by CrowdStrike that caused chaos for hospitals, airlines, emergency contact centers and businesses across the world, CrowdStrike’s stock (CRWD) appears to be relatively unscathed by the news as of Friday afternoon.
The Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company’s stock fell nearly 15 percent in after-hours trading Thursday due to its software update error that caused widespread outages for Microsoft Azure and CrowdStrike customers.
CrowdStrike stock fell from approximately $345 per share Thursday evening to $294 per share Friday morning.
However, the CRWD stock price has slowly been rebounding on Friday after the security firm said, “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
[Related: CrowdStrike Falcon Issue ‘Fix Has Been Deployed;’ Microsoft Identifies ‘Root Cause’ Of Outage]
CrowdStrike stock is currently trading at around $312 per share as of late morning Friday.
This means CrowdStrike’s share price has dropped 9 percent.
The outage stemmed from a recent faulty update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software that affected Windows 365 Cloud PCs, including software like Microsoft Teams and 365 Admin Center. Falcon is a platform designed to stop cybersecurity breaches using cloud technology.
Microsoft Stock Remains Unchanged
Millions of Microsoft Azure users were affected by the software update issue. Many customers leveraging the Windows operating system had their systems crash due to the way CrowdStrike’s faulty software update interacted with Windows.
Microsoft’s stock (MSFT) was ultimately not affected by the massive outage to its Microsoft 365 customers.
Microsoft stock slightly fell from $441 per share Thursday night to $433 per share as of Friday morning.
However, its stock is currently around $437 per share as of late morning Friday.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz Weighs In
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack and that his company has been working with clients “all night.”
“As you might imagine, we’ve been with our customers all night and working with them,” Kurtz said in an interview with the Today show Friday morning. “Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational.”
He added that, “it could be some time” before a full recovery is possible.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” Kurtz said.