Author: CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike, founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, built its dominance on the cloud-native Falcon platform, replacing legacy antivirus with behavioral detection. The company IPO'd in 2019 and rapidly captured market share from Symantec and McAfee, positioning itself as the "gold standard" for breach prevention. However, 2024 marked a turning point. The July 19, 2024 incident—where a faulty content update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices globally—shattered the company's aura of invincibility. That outage forced a reckoning regarding quality assurance. This new insider threat incident attacks the remaining pillar of their brand: trust. The company is currently cutting 5% of its workforce to improve efficiency, signaling a shift from "growth at all costs" to margin discipline.