CrowdStrike's CEO has been at the center of a global crisis before
CrowdStrike, which on Friday caused flights around the world to be canceled, some media outlets to go off the air, shopping to stop, and hospitals to postpone operations, is facing a tough test. But the company's CEO George Kurtz has actually been at the center of a similar global crisis before.
Much of the world was immobilized on Friday and cyber chaos disrupted many sectors. Broadcasts stopped, flights were canceled, thousands of passengers were stranded at airports, money could not be withdrawn from banks, transactions could not be made... At the center of all this is a software company called CrowdStrike, which many people have only recently heard of, but which has a considerable position in its sector.
The outage, which occurred after CrowdStrike, the cyber security giant used by many companies such as Microsoft, released a faulty update, caused global cyber chaos, while experts expect the outage to cost billions of dollars worldwide and its impact to last for weeks. 
1 PERCENT OF WINDOWS MACHINES AFFECTED
In fact, the CrowdStrike problem affected less than 1 percent of Windows machines - Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million machines running Windows software were affected - but even that was enough to send the world into chaos.
In a blog post, Microsoft said the impact of the outage on businesses worldwide reflected the use of CrowdStrike by many organizations running critical services, and said in a statement
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our vast ecosystem of global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors and customers. “It is also a reminder to all of us in the technology ecosystem how important it is to prioritize efforts focused on secure deployment and recovery using existing mechanisms.”
MARKET DOMINANCE ATTRACTED ATTENTION
This major disruption has also highlighted the market dominance of Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Data from Statista shows that Windows has about 72 percent of the global operating systems market share as of February, while CrowdStrike's market share in the security category is about 24 percent.
Amid all this chaos, all eyes turned to CrowdStrike. On Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that the problem had been identified, isolated and a fix had been implemented, and apologized to everyone affected for the issues.
He also said that despite this global issue, the company's customers are fully protected: “There was no security or cyber incident today. Our customers remain fully protected.” 
NOT HIS FIRST CRISIS
While it is noteworthy that Kurtz apologized, made statements and informed about the problem at the time of the crisis, this is not his first global crisis.
Technology industry analyst Anshel Sag reminded us of another technology crisis that occurred in 2010 when Kurtz was CTO at McAfee.
On April 21, 2010, antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by corporate customers. The update deleted an important Windows file and caused millions of computers worldwide to crash and reboot repeatedly. Similar to the CrowdStrike bug, the McAfee issue had to be fixed manually.
Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And a few months later, Kurtz left the company. In 2012, he founded CrowdStrike and has been its CEO ever since.
Sag recalled the first cyber chaos caused by Kurtz at X with this post: “For those who don't remember, back in 2010, McAfee had a massive failure of Windows XP that brought down much of the internet. The guy who was McAfee's CTO at the time is the CEO of CrowdStrike.”
CrowdStrike issued a statement on Friday in a company blog post about the problem that affected the entire world and millions of people: “We understand how the issue occurred and are conducting a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic error occurred. This work will continue. We are committed to identifying any fundamental or workflow improvements we can make to strengthen our process.”
