Global IT Outage at Microsoft: What is Crowdstrike, the Company Responsible for the Problem ?

the essential This Friday, July 19, 2024, Microsoft announced that it had been affected by widespread IT problems on their network. Services are affected all over the world. Many companies around the world have been affected, said the French IT Security Agency (Anssi).

Planes grounded, queues at airports, telecommunications problem for Australian TV ABC or the French group Canal +, London Stock Exchange disrupted: for a few hours, the number of companies doing state of outage or disruptions multiplied this Friday. According to Oleg Gorokhovsky, founder of the Ukrainian online bank Monobank, the outage is & quot;related to an interaction between Crowdstrike antivirus and Windows". But what is Crowdstrike?

IT Security

The company in question, namely Crowdstrike, is based in Austin in the United States, in the state of Texas. This company happens to be "the world's leading player in IT security known as device authentication (endpoint)" , indicate our colleagues from 7 out of 7.

In other words, these are programs that control access to a computer network of connected devices, such as a smartphone, a computer or even a tablet. George Kurtz, general director of the group but also co-founder like Dimitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, therefore focused on identifying computer threats around the world.

Anticipating attacks, such is the mission of this cell, such as a cyberattack carried out by the Russian government on the servers of the Democratic Party during the campaign for the American presidential election in 2016.

Customer and competitors

The companies implicated in this global outage which took place this Friday are Crowdstrike and Windows. While the operating system company is Crowdstrike's customer, Windows is also one of its competitors.

Indeed, because the company offers "its own computer protection services, just like Amazon or Google", underlines the Belgian media.

As for Crowdstrike, the company has nearly 8,000 employees, 7,925 more precisely, according to its annual report from the beginning of the year. In terms of profitability, it made $3.05 billion in turnover in 2023, which makes a net profit of $89 million. This is its first annual profit since its creation.