It’s a reminder of the complexity of our modern digital infrastructure that CrowdStrike, a company that’s not exactly a household name, can be at the heart of such worldwide disarray.
The US firm, based in Austin, Texas, is a listed company on the US stock exchange, featuring in both the S&P 500 and the high-tech Nasdaq indexes.
Like a lot of modern technology companies, it hasn’t been around that long. It was founded a mere 13 years ago, but has grown to employ nearly 8,500 people.
As a provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal with the aftermath of hack attacks.
It has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyber-attacks, such as when Sony Pictures had its computer system hacked in 2014.
But this time, because of a flawed update to its software, a firm that is normally part of the solution to IT problems has instead caused one.
In its last earnings report, CrowdStrike declared a total of nearly 24,000 customers. That’s an indication not just of the size of the issue, but also the difficulties that could be involved in fixing it.
Each of those customers is a huge organisation in itself, so the number of individual computers affected is hard to estimate.
