Name: CrowdStrike CEO: ‘We know what the issue is’ and are resolving it
Uploaded: 2024-07-20T14:15:38.000Z
Duration: 5 min 17 s
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We're now joined by the founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz.

George, it's good to see a lot of people woke up.

We've been hearing all about the messes at the airports, a lot of broadcast channels, Australia, even ours here.

We were we had those blue screens everywhere.

So first, thank you for giving me the opportunity to chat with you first on air.

And I want to start with saying we're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies.

We're resolving and have resolved the issue.

Now it's recovering systems that are out there.

And essentially, as you've talked about in the statement I put out is the system was sent an update and that update had a software bug in it and caused a an issue with the Microsoft operating system.

And we identified this very quickly and remediated the issue.

And as systems come back online, as they're rebooted, they're coming up and they're working.

And now we are working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online.

The issue in terms of a bug that was related to our update.

Mr. Kurtz, it's Savannah here in Milwaukee.

I mean, you're in the cybersecurity business and I certainly don't even pretend to understand this.

But according to your statement, it was a single content update that has managed to shut down air travel, credit card payment systems, banks, broadcast, street lights, 9-1-1, emergency around the globe.

Why is there not some kind of redundancy or some sort of backup?

How is it that one single software bug can have such a profound and immediate impact?

Well, when you look at the complexity of cybersecurity, you're always trying to stay one, excuse me, one step ahead of the adversaries.

We're always trying to stay one step ahead of the adversaries.

And in this particular case, you know, our systems are always looking for the latest attacks from these adversaries that are out there.

And as it does and it's been doing for many, many years, obviously, we've got a robust team that's looking at the safety and security and the quality of these updates.

And we have to go back and see what happened here.

But if there is a negative interaction with the way some of these operating systems work, in this particular case, it was only the Microsoft operating system that was impacted.

I think a lot of people woke up and wondered if something nefarious was afoot, if this was some kind of a cyber attack.

But you're saying that it was just something within your own system.

So now, as we sit here, I was watching the news out of Australia.

They were trying to get their television stations back on the air, their hospital software back up and running, the banks going.

How long does it take to get everything back up and running?

Well, yeah, first and foremost, again, just to reinforce what you said, it wasn't a cyber attack.

You know, it was related to this this content update.

And as you might imagine, we've been on with our customers all night and working with them.

Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it's coming up and it will be operational because of, you know, we fixed it on our end.

And some of the systems that aren't recovering, we're working with them.

So it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won't recover.

But it is, you know, it is our mission is why we're here to make sure that every customer is fully recovered.

And we're not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.

And we continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.

Did you ever think, Mr. Hearst, that you could experience something like this?

I mean, is this the breadth of this surprise you?

Well, when you look at software, it is a is a very complex world and there's a lot of interactions.

And always staying ahead of the adversary is certainly a tall task.

So these sort of things, obviously, you know, you try to understand and mitigate them.

And in some cases you have a weird interaction and it didn't seem like it happened on every Windows system.

There's different versions and flavors and patch levels, if you will.

And we're just trying to sort out where the that negative interaction was.

And again, that's what we're focused on, getting customers back up and running.

CrowdStrike CEO Joris Kurtz, we appreciate you coming on the air so quickly after this happened and explain your company's point of view.