Business Wars CrowdStrike: All Systems Down | Guarding the Cloud | 1
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Jan 28, 2026 A cloud-native cybersecurity startup's bold vision and rapid rise are explored. A routine software update morphs into a global IT meltdown. High-profile breach investigations and public forensic reports bring fame and controversy. Political fallout and conspiracy theories swirl as rapid growth exposes new vulnerabilities.
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3 A.M. Crisis Call That Changed Everything
- George Kurtz woke to a 3 a.m. call reporting devices crashing worldwide after a CrowdStrike update.
- The outage left airlines grounded, hospitals on paper, and trading desks dark, becoming a historic IT failure.
Cloud First Design—Power And Peril
- CrowdStrike built its product around a cloud-first, single-agent model to push instant global updates.
- That centralized design created speed and scale but introduced a single point of failure risk.
Napkin Sketch To $26M Bet
- George Kurtz and Dmitry Alperovitch sketched a unified cloud security idea on a napkin in 2011.
- They recruited FBI veteran Sean Henry and secured $26 million to launch CrowdStrike and its crowdsourced model.