CrowdStrike, company behind Microsoft global outage, accepts award for ‘epic fail’ - Watch

A global outage in Microsoft's Windows operating system caused massive disruption in airlines, financial firms, banks, media, infrastructure, and other industries in July. CloudStrike, a cyber security company, was widely blamed, as a software update from this company had gone wrong, apparently leading to the outage.

Now, the company has been given an award for 'epic fail' this past weekend. The president of CloudStrike was in attendance to receive the Pwnie Award, which is given out annually to celebrate and mock achievements and failures in the security industry.

Michael Sentonas took home a Pwnie for Most Epic Fail at Def Con, the hacking community event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Pwnies are a well-organised award, and come at the end of a nomination process. But the organisers said the award this year for CrowdStrike was a last-minute switch, "because… how could CrowdStrike not win?," TechCrunch said in a report.

While he said this was definitely not the award to be proud of receiving, Sentonas was still cool about it.

In his 'acceptance speech', Sentonas said he would take the award back to CrowdStrike headquarters in Austin, Texas, and display it in a prominent place to remind that “our goal is to protect people, and we got this wrong, and I want to make sure everybody understands these things can’t happen.” 

“I think the team was surprised when I said straightaway that I would get it...Because we got this horribly wrong, we’ve said this a number of different times, and it’s super important to own it when you do things well, it’s super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong,” he said.

What is CrowdStrike and how did it cripple global internet?

The irony is that CrowdStrike is a firm specialising in cyberattack response, threat intelligence and endpoint security.

The faulty update it issued on 19 July caused a worldwide outage that hit air travel, banking, broadcasting, and even power plants and transport services. It led to so-called 'blue screen of death' errors across displays using Windows operating system of Microsoft. It took a couple of days for Microsoft to fix the issue. 

An estimated 8.5 million computer systems running on the Windows operating system crashed or went into freeze mode, with the business cost of the outage thought to be at least $10 billion.

(With inputs from agencies)