The boss of the cybersecurity firm seemingly to blame for the unprecedented IT outage on Friday said he is “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers”.
Speaking to NBC, George Kurtz, founder and chief executive of CrowdStrike Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CRWD), conceded that it “could be some time for some systems” to come back online.
CrowdStrike apparently caused the global IT meltdown, which saw airlines grounded, emergency services go offline and broadcasters and telecoms companies go dark, because of a defect found in “a single content update” for Microsoft Windows hosts.
The error sent the world into turmoil on Friday, causing widespread disruption to businesses.
“We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue,” said Kurtz, stating that CrowdStrike was “working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online”.
NBC queried why a faulty update could cause such mayhem. “We have to go back and see what happened here”, Kurtz replied, though he ruled out the possibility of a malicious cyber attack.
Trains were heavily disrupted in the UK, while the NHS warned that thousands of GPs have been affected by an issue with the EMIS Web system.