Trains and planes around the world were stalled and grounded Friday due to an international Microsoft outage during what was supposed to be a routine update from a cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.
In what has been described as the “largest IT outage in history,” CrowdStrike’s catastrophic error fumbled every sector of the working world, from banks to hospitals, law enforcement, and McDonalds. But an update from CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, early Friday was surprisingly unapologetic and so bogged down in legalese that it was immediately read to filth by its customers.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. 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,” he continued. “We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”
Critics quickly observed that, despite the fact that the failure likely caused millions of dollars’ worth of damages around the globe, Kurtz refused to take any modicum of blame by writing the statement entirely in customer service jargon and by aggressively dodging any word combination that precisely identified the problem, offered a solution, or simply said, “I’m sorry.”
“It comes off as cowardly and callous,” wrote former Activision Blizzard CCO Lulu Cheng Meservey. “People might have died. And the CEO is not sorry.”
Kurtz had a significantly more human—albeit still callous—update in an interview with NBC News.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” Kurtz told the news outlet. “Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them. So it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover.”
