Alexandra Borgeaud
Research expert covering cybersecurity and tech in Latin America
CrowdStrike - statistics & facts
The rise of sophisticated cyber threats in the era of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) has brought with it the advent of multibillion-dollar cybersecurity companies. Founded in 2011 to "reinvent security for the cloud era", Texas-based CrowdStrike has quickly emerged as one of the global cybersecurity industry leaders, thanks to its ability to adapt to a fast-evolving technological and threat landscape. While CrowdStrike has a track record of uncovering major cyberattacks, the company's journey has not been without incident, including inadvertently causing a global computer outage that disrupted critical sectors in July 2024.
From antivirus to cybercrime investigations
In recent years, endpoint security – the protection of network-connected computing devices communicating with other points and devices across the network – has become an essential aspect of modern cybersecurity. Building on this context, CrowdStrike launched CrowdStrike Falcon, an antivirus package, as its first product in June 2013. CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence and detection products soon gained customers’ trust, and the company was involved in the investigations of several high-profile cyberattacks, such as the 2016 hack of servers owned by the U.S. Democratic National Committee. As a result, the company quickly became one of the leading cybersecurity providers worldwide, a success reflected in strong revenue growth.Securing the cloud-migration journey
As companies increasingly migrate their workloads to the cloud, adequate security solutions have become essential to ensuring business continuity, and CrowdStrike has profiled itself as a key player for protecting digital assets stored on cloud computing platforms. Since 2013, the company’s Falcon platform has evolved into the first multi-tenant, cloud native solution, comprised of 28 cloud modules capable of protecting workloads across on-premises, virtualized, and cloud-based environments running on a variety of endpoint devices such as desktops, laptops, servers, and IoT devices.Falcon update crashes millions of devices
On Friday July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike released a faulty configuration update for its Falcon sensor software, which caused some 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers to crash around the world. The issue triggered system crashes and displayed error messages on affected devices. This event has been described as one of the worst IT outages in history, with businesses, banks, hospitals, and airlines among the worst-hit, with some struggling to fully restore their systems days after the incident. Despite this, the outage is not expected to have a serious long-term effect on CrowdStrike’s dominant position in the cybersecurity landscape. Nevertheless, this event has shed light on the consequences of concentrating such a large part of the global cloud infrastructure in the hands of a few tech giants.
