I first saw this incident reported on Reddit's WSB thread in the wee hours this morning local time as I was heading to slumber. At first I thought it was a joke until I read another post stating the same thing.
Earlier, I had also been trying to watch the 11:00pm newscast on KING5-TV but noticed the recording was just a black screen on my DVR. Same thing on my other other DVR, and after seeing the other local channels were fine, I concluded only KING5 was off the air and it was not a problem at Comcast/Xfinity. Only a casual mention by one of their many newscasters on their Twitter feed clued anyone in, nothing on the main KING5 account or their webpage (which was still working).
I did not connect the two events until I read how widespread the CrowdStrike issue was worldwide and saw that KING5 was having a great deal of trouble getting back on the air.
Anyway, all this is to say, I read a few anecdotal experiences from IT people posting on Reddit whose companies were either considering using CRWD for their cybersecurity services or were already. All of them were annoyed enough by this outage to say they would be looking to other companies now instead of CRWD or would dump them completely.
I see the possible danger to CRWD's financials here as twofold. One, they will likely have to give discounts, credits, and make some promises in the near term to soothe their customers. Two, and perhaps the far worse one, new sales will be impacted since CRWD's reputation was damaged. However, what I don't know is how good SentinelOne's (S) or Palo Alto Network's (PANW) products are by comparison, CRWD's two closest competitors from what I can gather.
A third possible issue is a class action lawsuit against CRWD once the financial impact to customers is known, though I'm sure CRWD's contracts have language in them protecting them against such problems.
As you know, Trader J, the memories of IT professionals and CIO's tend to be long! Since I was a computer consultant myself for several decades, I know how important the relationship is between vendor and client for IT needs. I was definitely cautious about deploying new patches and updates or implementing major untested changes. Having made a few blunders with my own personal computer over the years by installing a patch or update too quickly and reaping the failures, I knew I had to be far more careful with clients.
Sorry for the long post, I hadn't intended to write so much here, I just found it all fascinating since I used to be "in the business" and once it became known how widespread the troubles were, causing a major news event. I guess CRWD was "lucky" in the sense that the impact was on a Friday and the stock won't have to trade over the weekend. People will have the weekend to calm down, digest this news, and assess it all, including giving most IT people time to fix things. |
