Michael Sentonas, the Australian President of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has apologised for the global IT outage which shut down about 8.5 million computers worldwide on Friday, July 19 likely costing billions.
Speaking with Sky News in his first interview since the tech outage, Mr Sentonas said he “personally apologises for what happened.”
“We understand the disruption and the distress that we caused a lot of people,” he said. “And firstly I think it’s important to say that we put out an update which we do regularly and we’ve been doing for over a decade and we got this very wrong.
“We’ve learnt a lot and ultimately we have to get better, and we let our customers down and that’s something that we have to address.”
The global crash was sparked by a CrowdStrike update that resulted in a ‘blue screen of death’ for millions of computers, knocking out critical computer systems in a range of services and businesses like supermarkets, banks, and airports.
Mr Sentonas said CrowdStrike was “absolutely” anticipating litigation or demands for compensation.
“Those conversations have to happen and will happen,” he said, while stressing that the company was currently rolling out updates to stamp out the bug.
Source: The Australian.
