CrowdStrike's President Accepted an Award for the 'Most Epic Fail' — It's a Great Lesson in Leadership (and Humility) A faulty CrowdStrike update in July affected 8.5 million Windows devices around the world.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- CrowdStrike accepted an award on Saturday for the "most epic fail" — and the company's president was on stage to accept it.
- "Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving," CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas said.
- CrowdStrike has already been sued by its shareholders and air travelers after its July 19 global incident.
After a single CrowdStrike update caused the largest IT outage in history last month, rippling across 8.5 million Windows devices, affecting 1.4 million travelers, and causing banking outages at JPMorgan and Bank of America, the last thing you'd expect is for the company to start receiving awards.
But on Saturday, CrowdStrike accepted a large, two-tiered trophy at the annual Pwnie Awards in Las Vegas — for the "most epic fail." Even more surprising? CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas accepted the award in person.
"Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving," he said when accepting the award. "I think the team was surprised when I said straightaway that I would come and get it because we got this horribly wrong."
Sentonas said he wanted to bring the trophy back to CrowdStrike headquarters in Austin, Texas, so every CrowdStrike employee would see it and learn from the incident.
"From that perspective, I will say thank you and take the trophy," Setonas said. "We'll put it in the right place and make sure everybody sees it."
CrowdStrike accepting the @PwnieAwards for "most epic fail" at @defcon. Class act. pic.twitter.com/e7IgYosHAE
— Dominic White ? (@singe) August 10, 2024
Though Sentonas accepted the award graciously, CrowdStrike's July 19 incident was more than a learning experience.
The outage was caused by a bug in a software update, which caused the blue screen of death on Microsoft Windows devices. The update delayed over 10,000 flights, resulted in canceled scheduled surgeries, disrupted 911 services, and impacted other operations across the globe.
It also may have cost Fortune 500 companies around $5.4 billion in damages. Delta wrote in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week that the outage affected 1.3 million of its customers, one day after some of those customers sued Delta in a class action lawsuit over how the airline handled canceled flights.
CrowdStrike was also sued by air travelers last week in a class action. CrowdStrike's shareholders additionally sued the company earlier this month after the company's share price dropped 32% in the 12 days after the outage.
