Watch: CrowdStrike CEO’s nervous response to question on outage in viral video

As the aftermath of Friday’s global IT outage continues to unfold, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz appeared to struggle when answering a question about the outage during an interview with a news channel. A clip of the moment has gone viral.

In an interview with NBC’s Today TV, the interviewer pressed Kurtz on how a single update could cause such a critical failure. The clip captures Kurtz taking long pauses, appearing flustered, and offering limited explanations.

CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity solutions for Microsoft Windows, deployed an update that disrupted millions of Windows devices on Friday, affecting several critical services, including flight operations and stock exchanges.

The show host asked, “According to your statement, it was a single content update that has managed to shut down air travel, credit card payment systems, banks, broadcast, street lights, 911, emergency around the globe. Why is there not some kind of redundancy or some sort of backup? How is it that one single software bug can have such a profound and immediate impact?”.

The CrowdStrike CEO seemed flustered and reached for his water glass before offering a reply.

Meanwhile, security experts said CrowdStrike’s routine update, which caused clients’ computer systems to crash globally, apparently did not undergo adequate quality checks before it was deployed.

“What it looks like is, potentially, the vetting or the sandboxing they do when they look at code, maybe somehow this file was not included in that or slipped through,” news agency Reuters quoted Steve Cobb, chief security officer at Security Scorecard, which also had some systems impacted by the issue.

According to him, the update’s problem was “in a file that contains either configuration information or signatures.

“It’s very common that security products update their signatures, like once a day… because they’re continually monitoring for new malware and because they want to make sure that their customers are protected from the latest threats. The frequency of updates is probably the reason why (CrowdStrike) didn’t test it as much,” he noted.

As per Microsoft’s estimate, the global tech outage affected nearly 85 lakh devices.