CrowdStrike CEO ‘deeply sorry’ after massive IT outage

The CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said Friday his company is “deeply sorry” in the wake of a global internet outage that hit airlines and businesses worldwide.

“I wanna start with saying we’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” George Kurtz said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. “So, we know what the issue is. We’re resolving and have resolved the issue. Now it’s recovering systems that are out there.”

According to flight-tracking website FlightAware, more than 27,000 flights were delayed worldwide, with more than 2,700 of them in the U.S. Multiple airlines noted they were facing troubles with technology Friday in posts on the social platform X.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz said in a post early Friday morning on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.”

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he added. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”

Kurtz said in the interview that his company had “been on with our customers all night and working with them.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up and it’d be operational, because of, we fixed it on our end,” he said. “And some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a post on X that it “is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines.

“Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved,” the FAA added.