The impact of the recent CrowdStrike outage is hitting the company where it hurts — in the wallet. Overnight predictions saw up to 21% being knocked off the company's stock price, equal to around $16 billion in market cap. The situation is only moderately better in the cold light of day — we've been tracking MarketWatch, and at the time of publication, CrowdStrike has seen a 15% drop in its shares, wiping $12.5 billion off its market cap.
If you've been affected by the CrowdStrike outage, we've got a guide on how to fix it in just three minutes. We also have full coverage of the event and its slow resolution.
During the early hours of the outage, CNBC reported that shares in CrowdStrike had fallen sharply by 20%, around $16 billion, which Faisal Islam, BBC Economics Editor, confirmed. Even Microsoft wasn't immune; its share price dropped by 2.5%, but still nowhere near as damaging as the 12.5% now experienced by CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike ended trading on July 18 at $343.05, and when trading resumed on July 19, it opened at $294.51. At the time of writing, the share price is hovering between $308.70 and $309.19. According to MarketWatch's price tracker, the share price has decreased 16.69% over the last five days and 16.82% over the month.
Earlier today, George Kurtz, President and CEO of Crowdstrike, released a statement via X (formerly Twitter) to respond to the many hours of silence during which millions of users were left in the dark about the root cause of the issue.
"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers."
Originally, the crashing issues were thought to be related to Microsoft's Azure and Ofice365, but other users reported the same issue.
Later in the day, Kurtz was interviewed by NBC and confirmed that the update was the root cause of the outage. Kurtz describes the update as a "content update," which sounds like it wasn't a big update. We don't know what the update was, but for an update to a globally used security application, one would assume that all updates are checked during a testing phase before release.
The ramifications of just one update have been felt around the world. IT systems for hospitals, transportation, payroll, and even the Mercedes F1 team felt the impact of the outage during setup for the upcoming Hungarian Grand Prix. What's ironic is that CrowdStrike advertises on the Mercedes F1 team cars and overalls.
