I missed one of the more significant bits of information about the CrowdStrike debacle, that its CEO, George Kurtz, was CTO at McAfee over a decade ago when they were responsible for a similar disaster.
The degree to which people like Kurtz continue to succeed at jobs for which they are patently ill suited just buggers the mind:
A good portion of the world stood still on Friday, resulting in one of the most widespread tech outages of all time.
The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.
Many industries were still digging out of the debacle on Saturday. The fallout is expected to last weeks.
………
Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the center of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn't the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.
On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.
Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.
"For those who don't remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet," Sag wrote on X. "The man who was McAfee's CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike."
Seriously, how has this guy risen in the ranks of IT security after being at the helm of a huge f%$# up?
Oh, right, CrowdStrike. The CIA's favorite security firm.
The CIA loves incompetence.
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