On July 19th, a flawed update from security firm CrowdStrike paralyzed a range of services globally, including banking, airlines, healthcare , and communications. Many businesses operating these critical services are CrowdStrike customers; therefore, even though it only affected about 1% of Windows devices, the incident had enormous consequences and is expected to take weeks to fix.

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CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz previously served as Chief Technology Officer at McAfee. Photo: Bloomberg.

CrowdStrike admitted its mistake and issued an apology that same day. All attention was focused on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. According to tech analyst Anshel Sag, this wasn't the first time Kurtz had played a significant role in a major IT incident.

On April 21, 2010, security firm McAfee released a software update for its enterprise customers. However, it deleted a critical Windows file, causing millions of computers worldwide to crash and repeatedly restart. Similar to the CrowdStrike error, the McAfee incident required manual intervention.

At the time, Kurtz was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of McAfee. Intel later acquired the company. Kurtz left McAfee a few months later and founded CrowdStrike in 2012, where he has served as CEO ever since.

Sag wrote on X: “For those who don’t remember, in 2010, McAfee had a serious glitch with Windows XP and brought down a large part of the internet. The person who was McAfee’s CTO at the time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike.”

In response to media inquiries, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog post detailing the issue and suggesting a fix, but declined to explain why the faulty update bypassed the company's security protocols. In the post, the security firm wrote: “We understand why the issue occurred and are analyzing the root cause to determine how the logic error occurred. Efforts are ongoing.”

(According to Insider)