Until this Friday, few people outside the information technology sector knew about CrowdStrike. Everything changed when it became known that the cause of the “computer blackout” that occurred across the world was an error in a software update by the cybersecurity company.
The effects were felt in areas as diverse as airports – with many flights cancelled or delayed -, banking, commerce, hospitals, stock exchanges and public administration bodies.
The company, founded in 2011 in Austin, Texas, by former McAfee executives, was known in the technology sector as one of the largest providers of software to protect against attacks and ransomware. Today’s failure was quickly punished on Wall Street, with the company’s shares falling as much as 15%. At the end of the session, the drop was slightly smaller: 11.1%, but it still corresponded to a reduction of $9.2 billion in CrowdStrike’s market capitalization.
According to consultancy IDC, the company has a share of around 18% of the “modern protection software” market, valued at 12.6 billion dollars.In an interview with CNBC, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to the company’s customers, who in some cases were left without access to their systems for long hours.
But the scenario, in some cases, could be much worse, according to Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, in statements to Bloomberg. The expert admitted that, for some of the affected entities, full recovery could take days.
“The economic impact will be gigantic,” he added.
CrowdStrike ended the day with a stock market value of $74.2 billion and, despite today’s fall, has accumulated a 19.44% increase since the beginning of the year.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2025, which ended April 30, the cybersecurity company saw its operating income reach $199 million, a year-on-year increase of 72%. Revenue amounted to $872 million, an increase of 34%, while profits soared from $491,000 to $42.8 million.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
