CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas accepts ‘Most Epic Fail’ award after global Microsoft IT outage

The CrowdStrike-Microsoft IT outage last month brought down airlines and other industries worldwide [File] | Photo Credit: Reuters

CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas accepted the ‘Most Epic Fail’ award at the Pwnie Awards event this year during DEF CON 32 in Las Vegas, after a faulty bug update by his cybersecurity company in July caused a Microsoft outage that brought down airlines, payment systems, hospitals, and other industries across the globe.

The Pwnie Awards is an annual event “celebrating and making fun of the achievements and failures of security researchers and the wider security community,” according to their official X account.

“This award will honor a person or corporate entity’s spectacularly epic fail – the kind of fail that lets the entire infosec industry down in its wake. It can be a singular incident, marketing piece, or investment – or a smoldering trail of whale-scale fail,” said part of a notice on Pwnie Awards website.

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Video clips from the event showed Sentonas sportively accepting the giant award as he acknowledged CrowdStrike’s mistakes and promised to do better. The Pwnie Awards also encouraged users to be compassionate to the company’s employees.

“We got this horribly wrong,” said Sentonas, adding that he would display the trophy in a place where CrowdStrike employees could see it.

“…you know, our goal is to protect people, and we got this wrong and I want to make sure that everybody understands these things can’t happen and that’s what this community is about,” Sentonas said to the gathering of technologists as he accepted the award.

CrowdStrike’s faulty bug update on July 18/19 affected people from Australia to India and the UK to the U.S. Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled, airports moved to manual boarding processes, digital transactions failed, and sick patients had to deal with postponed treatments.

Many critical enterprises were impacted, with Delta Air Lines even threatening legal action to make up for the millions of dollars it said it bore in losses.

CrowdStrike is facing scrutiny from the U.S. government as a result of the huge outage, in which over 8 million devices were affected. Regulators have also brought up antitrust concerns.

CrowdStrike was further sued by shareholders, as the share price fell by over 34% in the past month.