On July 19, a bug update by security firm CrowdStrike paralyzed a series of services such as banking, aviation, healthcare, media, etc. globally. Many businesses operating critical services are CrowdStrike customers, so even though it only affected about 1% of Windows devices, the incident had huge consequences and is expected to take weeks to fix.

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CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz used to be McAfee's CTO. Photo: Bloomberg

CrowdStrike admitted its mistake and issued an apology the same day. All eyes are on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. According to technology analyst Anshel Sag, this is not the first time Kurtz has played a key role in a major IT incident.

On April 21, 2010, security firm McAfee released a software update for its corporate customers that deleted a critical Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and reboot. Similar to CrowdStrike’s mistake, the McAfee incident required manual action.

Kurtz was then the CTO of McAfee, which was later acquired by Intel. Kurtz left McAfee a few months later and founded CrowdStrike in 2012, where he has served as CEO ever since.

“For those who don’t remember, in 2010, McAfee had a major Windows XP glitch that took down a large portion of the Internet. The CTO of McAfee at the time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike,” Sag wrote on X.

Responding to media inquiries, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog post detailing the issue and suggesting a fix, but declined to explain how the flawed update bypassed the company’s security protocols. “We understand why this occurred and are conducting a root cause analysis to determine how the logic error occurred. Our efforts are ongoing,” the security firm wrote in the post.

(According to Insider)