While a computer outage has been paralyzing many companies around the world since Friday morning, whether airlines, airports, banks, media or hospitals, the cause of this major incident seems to be becoming clearer. With, at the heart of the problem, the American cybersecurity group CrowdStrike.
According to Oleg Gorokhovsky, founder of the Ukrainian online bank Monobank, the outage is “related to an interaction between the CrowdStrike antivirus and Windows”. The German government gave the same analysis, explaining that this global IT outage is linked to a “faulty update” of an IT solution – an antivirus – from the CrowdStrike group. The latter would have communicated “a workaround” for the problem to the affected companies, which reported “no signs of a cyberattack”, a spokesman for the German Interior Ministry, Mehmet Ata, told the press.
After several hours of silence, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz finally spoke out this Friday afternoon. The problem is “identified” and “being corrected,” he announced. on the social network Xassuring that it was not “a security incident or a cyberattack”. The American company relies heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and notably offers a digital protection platform called Falcon.
Consequences on the stock market
While many companies around the world have been shut down since this morning, and this major outage is taking time to resolve, this incident is not without consequences for CrowdStrike’s reputation. The group’s shares fell by nearly 17% this Friday around noon (Paris time) in electronic trading before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. Its market capitalization, which corresponds to the total amount of its shares available on the stock markets, stood at $83 billion before the incident.
Microsoft shares were down about 2.5 percent in pre-market trading at 12:00 p.m. ET. Actual trading on the New York Stock Exchange runs from 3:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. ET, but investors can take positions on companies through derivatives between trading sessions.