CrowdStrike Claws Back $30 Billion Lost to Mass Tech Outage

CrowdStrike’s CEO says the company has turned last year’s crisis into an opportunity.

A botched update by the cybersecurity company last summer caused a worldwide outage of Windows computers and servers. Since then, the firm has recovered the $30 billion in market value it lost after the incident, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday.

According to the report, the company’s shares — which plummeted by more than a third in the two weeks following the outage — are now worth more than they were before the glitch.

CEO George Kurtz told the FT the company had recovered by turning the crisis into “a competitive advantage,” noting that the incident hadn’t lessened customers’ trust.

“Customers are staying with us,” Kurtz said. “We had one customer say that broken bones heal stronger and they don’t expect this to reoccur. Conversely, from a competitor standpoint, that hasn’t gone through something like this, there’s probably more risk.”

The FT noted that CrowdStrike had a reputation as the first line of defense against cyberthreats for many high-profile companies, which exacerbated the scale of the outage on July 19.

And while insurers project that the outage could lead to billions of dollars in losses, CrowdStrike only moderately reduced its fourth quarter guidance, the report said, saying it had seen a 97% customer retention rate in the quarter when the outage happened.

That isn’t to say all customers are happy with CrowdStrike following the incident. Delta Air Lines, which had 7,000 flights grounded by the outage, sued CrowdStrike in October. The airline is seeking monetary compensation after suffering $500 million in losses.

“Delta’s claims are based on disproven misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works and reflect a desperate attempt to shift blame for its slow recovery away from its failure to modernize its antiquated IT infrastructure,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

The CrowdStrike outage came during a year in which cybersecurity “took center stage,” as PYMNTS wrote recently.

While this incident was the result of a glitch, the year saw a number of damaging breaches, such as the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that led to billions in losses, and the Snowflake data breach that impacted more than 160 of the world’s largest companies.

“As we move into 2025, organizations and individuals must prioritize cybersecurity as a strategic imperative,” PYMNTS wrote. “Staying secure in 2025 demands an approach that combines technology, education and preparedness. Companies should consider taking steps such as implementing zero-trust architectures, performing regular penetration testing and deploying advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems to reduce vulnerabilities.”

 

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