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- A faulty update from CrowdStrike caused a global tech outage on Friday.
- CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been down this road before.
- As CTO of McAfee in 2010, Kurtz was at the center of another similar tech debacle.
A good portion of the world stood still on Friday, resulting in one of the most widespread tech outages of all time.
The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.
Many industries were still digging out of the debacle on Saturday. The fallout is expected to last weeks.
CrowdStrike owned up to its mistake, issuing an apology and a workaround on Friday. But it has yet to detail just how a destructive update could have been released without being caught by testing and other safeguards.
Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the center of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn't the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.
On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.
Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.
"For those who don't remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet," Sag wrote on X. "The man who was McAfee's CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike."
In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog posts detailing the problem and its recommended fix, but did not elaborate on how the update slipped through the company's safety protocols.
"We understand how this issue occurred and we are doing a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic flaw occurred," the company says in the post. "This effort will be ongoing. We are committed to identifying any foundational or workflow improvements that we can make to strengthen our process."