CrowdStrike accepts 'Most Epic Fail' award after global IT outage
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has accepted a "Most Epic Fail" award following its faulty software update that triggered a global IT outage.
The tech firm's president Michael Sentonas received the award at the 2024 Pwnie Awards, an annual ceremony celebrating and making fun of the achievements and failures of security researchers.
The event took place on Aug. 10 at the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas, where CrowdStrike had one of the biggest booths, as per TechCrunch.
"Definitely not the award to be proud of accepting but I think the team was surprised when I said straight away I would get it," Sentonas said. "Because we got this horribly wrong, we've said this a number of different times, and it's super important to own it when you do things well, it's super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong."
Sentonas continued to say he wanted to bring back the trophy to their headquarters and put it somewhere people could see. According to him, this is to remind workers that their goal is to protect people.
"We got this wrong, and I want to make sure everybody understands these things can't happen," he said.
On July 19, about 8.5 million Windows computers suffered a glitch that stemmed from a software update from CrowdStrike's Falcon. Banks, airlines, and TV broadcasts were affected by the outage.
The Pwnie Awards also recognize epic achievements, lamest vendor response, most under-hyped research, most innovative research, best song, and more.