CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz 'deeply sorry' for the outage

CrowdStrike's CEO said the company has identified the update which led to a worldwide crash in the Windows systems and a fix has been deployed.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz has issued an apology over the disruptive outage that its software update caused to global clients, and said the company is working with each and every customer to bring them back online. Kurtz was speaking to NBC's 'Today' show.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this including our companies,” Kurtz said on the show.

On July 19, the shares of CrowdStrike slipped 15 percent at open on Nasdaq. At 19:15, the stock was trading 11.59 percent lower at $303.29.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring software had sent an update, which led the Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. The subsequent disruption resulted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services triggering a worldwide IT outage disrupting several businesses globally.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO added that the cybersecurity firm identified the issue very quickly and started to fix it after it found that the system update that was sent had a software bug which caused an issue with the Microsoft's operating system. "We are working with each and every customer to ensure we bring them back online", he added.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz said in dealing with cybersecurity, companies always try to stay one step ahead of the latest attacks from the adversaries. "If there is a negative interaction with the way these operating systems work, in this particular case it was in Microsoft Operating System, you will see a reaction like this", he added.

"Many of the customers are rebooting their systems, and it could be some time for some system while they recover", Kurtz told NBC after a long night of trying to mitigate the issue. "Software is a complex world, and staying ahead of adversaries is a tall task", said Kurtz.

IT security tools are meant to ensure that they operate in the worst-case scenario. "To be the root cause of a global IT outage is an unmitigated disaster", Ajay Unni, CEO of StickmanCyber, a cybersecurity company told Reuters. Shares of CrowdStrike were down close to 20 percent during pre-market trade on Wall Street this Friday. Shares of Microsoft too were under pressure during pre-market trade in US.