CrowdStrike Shares Continue To Tumble As Outage Drags On
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A pair of downgrades from Wall Street analysts and ongoing disruptions to flights weighed on the cybersecurity vendor’s stock price Monday.
Following the CrowdStrike-caused Microsoft Windows outage Friday, a pair of downgrades from Wall Street analysts and ongoing flight disruptions sank the cybersecurity vendor’s stock price lower Monday.
As of this writing Monday morning, CrowdStrike’s stock price was down 10.6 percent to $272.46 a share. That’s on top of the 11.1 percent drop CrowdStrike shares saw on Friday following the massive worldwide outage.
[Related: CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage: 5 Key Updates To Know]
The downgrades came from Guggenheim and BTIG, according to Nasdaq.com. Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci reportedly told investors that he expects “resistance to new deals in the near term” for cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike in the wake of the outage. However, CrowdStrike’s response to the situation was nonetheless “impressive,” DiFucci added.
CrowdStrike’s defective Falcon update led to the “blue screen of death” for Windows systems worldwide on Friday and brought widespread disruptions to air travel, health care, banking and more. Microsoft disclosed Saturday that 8.5 million Windows devices were impacted by CrowdStrike’s update.
Experts have called it the largest IT outage of all time, and the impacts reportedly continued on Monday.
Delta had canceled an additional 600 flights scheduled for Monday as of 8 a.m. EDT, Quartz reported, citing the flight tracking site FlightAware. Delta had previously canceled nearly 5,000 flights between Friday and Sunday, according to reports. CRN has reached out to Delta for comment.
In a note to investors Monday, Wedbush Securities’ Daniel Ives wrote that there are “some lingering issues into this week so far out of the gates.”
“We are seeing IT outage issues still persist in spots around the globe from the CrowdStrike IT outage heard around the world on Friday,” wrote Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush. “This is not good news for [CrowdStrike CEO] George Kurtz & Co. in an already bad situation as it appears a number of businesses are still finding difficulty on the path to normalization from this IT outage despite fixes/mediations released throughout the weekend.”
CrowdStrike and Microsoft have sought to help expedite the recovery process for the millions of affected Windows devices.
Over the weekend, CrowdStrike posted a “Remediation and Guidance Hub” that aims to assist with recovering from the outage, including through providing technical details and guidance on key areas of focus for IT administrators.
Microsoft, meanwhile, released a free tool Sunday to help clients recover from the outage, enabling admins to more quickly recover Windows devices using a more automated approach.
In an update late Friday evening, CrowdStrike identified a “logic error” as the culprit in the Microsoft outage. The programming error was triggered by a sensor configuration update to Falcon.
For a still-unknown reason, “this configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems,” the company said.