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- Secretary, Natalie Sherman and Liv McMahon
- Part, BBC News
Shares of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike fell more than 13% as the company weighed the impact of a global IT meltdown.
Chief security officer Shawn Henry said the incident had been “chaos” for the firm, which was once one of the most trusted names in the industry.
“We’re letting down the very people we’re trying to protect, and to say we’re frustrated is an understatement,” he said.
Many businesses are recovering after a botched “update” last week damaged 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers worldwide.
This issue requires a manual restart in some cases.
Mr Henry, a former FBI assistant director, said the weekend had been “the most difficult 48 hours” of his 12 years at the company.
He promised to use the event as an opportunity to “show better and be stronger than before”.
“The trust we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets in a matter of hours, and it was a gut punch,” he said in a LinkedIn post on Monday.
But this is nothing compared to the pain we have caused our customers and partners.
That was far more than other airlines.
Delta on Monday said more than half of its IT systems are Windows-based and require manual maintenance. It said the software it uses to manage flight crews requires a lot of time and manual support to fix.
“We have everyone around the company working around the clock to get this process where it needs to be,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a video message to employees on Monday.
The day before, he apologized to customers, as US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has warned the government has received complaints about “continued disruptions and unacceptable customer service” at the plant.
Other agencies, such as the UK’s National Health Service, have said their systems are operating normally.
Speaking to the House of Commons on Monday, Cabinet Office Minister Ellie Reeves said most of the sectors affected by the CrowdStrike bug had recovered, including aviation, rail and maritime.
But he warned that “minimal disruption” would continue, including for the NHS.
He added that the government will work with the National Cyber Security Agency and other partners “to assess lessons learned”.
The incident showed how the modern world depends on “complex and interconnected IT systems and how important preparation for such incidents is”, the Minister told the MP.
Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike boasts nearly 29,000 clients worldwide, including US and UK government agencies and some of the world’s largest companies.
Shares in the firm were up nearly 40% this year before the incident.
But the hit in CrowdStrike shares on Monday followed an 11% drop on Friday, reflecting the severity of the incident. The firm’s share price ended trading below $264, down more than 13%.
Some investors are betting that its rivals will benefit from its current crisis, which has exposed the world’s dependence on one big player, drawing attention from anti-monopoly authorities.
Sentinel One, for example, saw shares rise more than 8% on Monday.
Analysts say that despite the current damage to CrowdStrike’s stock, they don’t foresee long-term damage to the business.
“The reality is that despite CrowdStrike’s massive failure last week, there are few alternatives to CrowdStrike and the costs of switching are high,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, known for its investments in technology, he wrote on social media.
“In other words, when the company reports its quarter of July towards the end of August, I expect the explanation to give an unknown opinion about keeping customers in the near term. That said, I expect that there will be fewer customer errors in the long run.”
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said it will be important for CrowdStrike to resolve its issues this week.
“This will take time to settle but does not change our long-term view of CrowdStrike or the cyber security industry,” he wrote in a note on Monday.
Reporting by Chris Vallance
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