Nearly a month after the CrowdStrike outage shook the entire IT industry, the cybersecurity firm has resorted to a rather unusual way of damage control.
Michael Sentonas, the company's president accepted the "Most Epic Fail" at the Pwnie Awards.
CrowdStrike accepting the @PwnieAwards for “most epic fail” at @defcon. Class act. pic.twitter.com/e7IgYosHAE
— Dominic White 👾 (@singe) August 10, 2024
"Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving but 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 while accepting the award.
Emphasisng on how important it was to "own it", the president of the company said that he will take this trophy with him to the headquarters.
"I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it because our goal is to protect people and we got this wrong and I want to make sure that everybody understands these things can't happen and that's what this community is about."
Sentonas sportingly accepted the comically large trophy and signed off from the stage, saying that he will put it in the right place and make sure everyone sees it.
For the unversed, a software update last month by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered system problems for Microsoft customers, including many airlines.
As a result of this, the company's legal troubles mounted as it was sued by air travelers whose flights were delayed or canceled. In a proposed class action filed in the Austin, Texas, federal court, three fliers blamed CrowdStrike's negligence in testing and deploying its software for the outage, which also disrupted banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world.
The plaintiffs said that as fliers scrambled to get to their destinations, many spent hundreds of dollars on lodging, meals and alternative travel, while others missed work or suffered health problems from having to sleep on the airport floor.
They said CrowdStrike should pay compensatory and punitive damages to anyone whose flight was disrupted, after technology-related flight groundings for Southwest Airlines and other carriers in 2023 made the outage "entirely foreseeable."
CrowdStrike said in a statement: "We believe this case lacks merit and we will vigorously defend the company."
It provided an identical statement in response to a shareholder lawsuit filed on July 31, after the company's stock price had fallen by about one-third.
The outage stemmed from a flawed software update that crashed more than 8 million computers.
(With Reuters inputs)