CrowdStrike was brought before a US Congressional Committee on September 24 to explain why its cybersecurity solution triggered one of the largest IT outages ever seen. A senior official told Congress that the company was “deeply sorry” that a flawed update pushed out to its market-leading Falcon endpoint detection and response (EDR) software in July caused widespread disruption across airlines, banking systems, healthcare, manufacturing, government services, and more.
The financial cost is still being counted, but it’s estimated that the outage caused more than $500 billion in direct losses at Fortune 500 companies with only around 10-20 percent of these losses likely to be covered by insurers. Delta, for example, was forced to ground more than 7,000 flights in the aftermath, incurring losses of $500 million. The risk of lawsuits being launched against CrowdStrike by companies impacted in this way remains very real.
