Crowdstrike CEO issues apology for ‘mother of all outages’ – but admits it could be hours before systems are back online

Crowdstrike has apologized after it caused global chaos on Friday by a faulty update to its software that caused an outage at Microsoft.

The cybersecurity company’s CEO, George Kurtz, said in a public speech about six hours after the systems went down that the “blue screen of death” was caused by a software bug.

“We deeply regret the impact this has caused to our customers, travelers and everyone affected, including our business,” Kurtz said in an interview with NBC’s “Today.”

He also promised to work with each client individually to get their operations back online, which could take hours.

“Many customers are restarting the system and it will be operational soon,” Kurtz said.

“It may take some time for some systems to automatically recover,” he added, but the company “is committed to ensuring every customer is fully recovered.”

Americans woke up to the news of the “mother of all failures.” Computers running Windows were stuck on a blue screen with the error message “DRIVER_OVERRAN_STACK_BUFFER.”

However, Crowdstrike’s bug also paralyzed banks, airlines, television networks, trains and healthcare institutions.

Photos and videos from airports across the country showed weary travelers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would even take off.

Many hospitals cancelled all appointments on Friday because their networks were jammed.

“If you look at the software, it’s a very complex world with a lot of interactions. It’s a challenge to always stay one step ahead of the opponent,” Kurtz told Today.

‘These kinds of things, you try to understand them and limit them, of course, but in some cases there’s a strange interaction. It doesn’t seem to happen on every Windows system. There are different versions, flavors, patch levels.

Images and footage from airports across the country showed weary travelers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would depart. Pictured are people waiting at JFK Airport in New York

“We’re just trying to figure out where that negative interaction came from and then we’re focusing on that to get the customers back up and running.”

Kurtz was asked how a single software bug could have such a large and immediate impact.

The CEO started to cry and seemed nervous after the question. He said that the update had been sent and that the team now had to ‘go back and see what happened’.

Kurtz posted around 5:30 a.m. ET on X that Crowdstrike had released a fix for the default, but did not provide a timeline for when the Americas would be back online and operational.

“As you can imagine, we’ve been working with our customers all night,” he said. “A lot of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s up and running now because we’ve fixed it on our end.”

“It could take a while,” he added. “Sometimes some systems don’t automatically recover… we’re not going to give up until we get all our customers back to where they were.”

The flaw was uploaded to Crowdstrike’s ‘Falcon Sensor’ software, which analyzes connections to and from the internet to determine if malicious behavior is present.

Kurtz apologized today after the CEO shared a post on X saying the company had implemented a fix.

The messages caused an uproar among the public, which the lack of instructions from the CEO and the ‘poor communication’ about the ‘mother of all failures’.