Tech

“Most epic fail” — CrowdStrike President accepts award after global IT outage

Published

4 weeks ago

August 12, 2024

The president of CrowdStrike has accepted the award for ‘Most Epic Fail’ at the 2024 ‘Pwnie Awards’, hosted at this year’s DefCon hacking conference.

Per TechCrunch, CrowdStrike was already in attendance at the cybersecurity gathering, manning one of the largest booths at the event, and dispatching free t-shirts and action figures to attendees/

Fans have already been leaping to the defence of the company that put millions of Windows machines out of action pending a fix to be manually applied in safe mode, calling them a “class act” after CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas acknowledged that the ward was “definitely not [one] to be proud of receiving”.

CrowdStrike hanging by a thread

I’m fascinated by the idea by a company in line for a lawsuit leveraged by the airline Delta and another by its own shareholders can rehabilitate itself.

Sentonas was, to be clear, quite apologetic for thrusting a great deal of the world’s digital infrastructure, from transport to retail, into chaos, admitting that “[CrowdStrike] got this horribly wrong […] and it’s super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong.”

“Our goal is to protect people,” he went on, “and we got this wrong, and I want to make sure everybody understands [that] these things can’t happen.”

This is a lovely sentiment from CrowdStrike, but it’s also one being expressed on camera in front of a sympathetic audience proud to host them. Actions speak louder than words, which is at least something that the company claims to understand.

Last week, it was revealed that systems in place to truly make it so that ‘these things’ (a broken update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon software) can’t happen failed to work as intended, allowing the things that can’t happen to happen.