Last July, an incident due to a faulty update of the security platform CrowdStrike caused a Massive blackout that left the systems of thousands of companies inactive and organizations around the world for several hours, and caused many companies and entities to take several days to fully recover from the incident. But contrary to what it might seem at first, It seems like it could avoid many of the legal problems and lawsuits that could be expected from the situation.
CrowdStrike CFO Burt Podbere confirmed during his appearance at Citi’s technology conference that they are still waiting for a lawsuit to be filed against them. He also spoke about the incident and its impact on the company, both at the time and in the future, according to The Register.
The CrowdStrike-related outage was caused by a configuration file update that CrowdStrike’s software failed to parse. The result was thousands of computers stuck in an endless loop displaying the Windows Blue Screen of Death.
Podbere acknowledged that, in light of what happened, “People were angry«But according to him, customers soon changed their minds and welcomed CrowdStrike’s attempts to explain the problem and help them get their systems up and running. However, the executive acknowledged that the problem had had some impact on its finances, which is presumably still to be determined.
But despite Podebere’s optimism, there are still threats of lawsuits. Over the past few weeks, there have been rumors that several companies are going to sue CrowdStrike. One of them is Delta Airlines, which last month already threatened to go to court and file a lawsuit for gross negligence. At the time, CrowdStrike apologized but commented that “Public posturing about the possibility of filing a worthless lawsuit against CrowdStrike as a long-time partner is not constructive to either party.«.
But he also admitted that he doesn’t know how it’s all going to end, and that all they’re trying to do is “to remove legal discussions from the interaction with clients, and move it to business discussions. As time goes by it becomes easier, because we are getting out of the rut, and that is how we see it.«.
But despite all this, the legal fallout from the incident is unlikely to go away anytime soon. For now, One of CrowdStrike’s vice presidents has been called to testify before the US Homeland Security Committee later this month, and it cannot be ruled out that legal consequences will result. It is also unclear what Delta Air Lines will ultimately do.
