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On Friday, tech outages swept the world from hospitals and airlines, to banks and courts. Flights were grounded, payments delayed and hospitals across the world reported problems.
A worldwide glitch, which affected major companies including Microsoft, took much of the world’s infrastructure offline. The problems stemmed from a global software update sent out by cybersecurity specialists, CrowdStrike.
Crowdstrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, later issued a statement reassuring customers that the outage was not “a security incident or cyber attack.”
Kurtz, also the founder of Crowdstrike, has extensive experience in the industry, having previously worked in several prominent roles for rival cyber security firm McAfee. The Crowdstrike website lists him as “an internationally recognized security expert, author, entrepreneur, and speaker.”
A native of Parsippany, New Jersey, the 59-year-old tech entrepreneur did not grow up wealthy, and studied accounting at Seton Hall University. His net worth is $3.1bn, according to Forbes, though this substantial fortune took a hit of $300m following Friday’s outages.
After college, Kurtz began his career at Price Waterhouse – now PwC – as an accountant, and was one of the first hires in its security group.
In 1999, he co-wrote Hacking Exposed, a book about cybersecurity for network administrators, with Stuart McClure and Joel Scambray. The book sold more than 600,000 copies and was translated into more than 30 languages.
Later that year, in October, Kurtz started Foundstone, a worldwide security products and anti-virus software company, described as having “one of the leading incident response practices in the industry.” He served as the company’s CEO and it was acquired by McAfee in October of 2004 for $90m.
At McAfee, a security company valued at $2.5bn, he roles included Worldwide Chief Technology Officer and GM as well as EVP of Enterprise.
However, Kurtz became frustrated by McAfee’s slow response to the changing nature of cyberthreats, which was highlighted by an incident on a plane in 2011. He recalled watching a fellow passenger take 15 minutes to download the company’s service on a laptop.
Speaking to Forbes in 2020, he said: "The guy was talking to the flight attendant, he was reading his newspaper, and he’s doing all these things while the software is grinding away and I’m just sitting there going, oh my God. I’m the CTO of this company, and this is terrible."
Along with Dmitri Alperovitch, Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California, and formally launched the company in February 2012 after securing $25m in funding. Alperovitch has since left the company – which went public in 2019.
Its initial slogan was "We Stop Breaches".
According to Forbes, Kurtz owns around 5 percent stake in the company, which recorded $2.24bn in revenues in the year through January 2023.
The cybersecurity company lost a whopping $9bn overnight on Thursday as reports of the outages began to emerge, dropping from around $83.5bn to $74.2bn on Friday afternoon.
Crowdstrike was previously cast into the public eye in 2016 when the Democratic National Committee hired the company to investigate a leak of its emails to the public.
The company identified attempts by two Russian intelligence groups, codenamed Cosy Bear and Fancy Bear, to hack various US government entities including the White House, State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The hackers had also stolen emails from the DNC and from Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and passed them to Wikileaks.
On Friday, Kurtz issued a statement apologizing “deeply” to all those affected by the outages and reassuring customers that the problem was not “a security incident or cyber attack.”
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz said. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”
Despite the drop in his personal fortune and the value of the company on Friday, Kurtz is still valued at around $3.1bn. He is an accomplished race car driver who won the LMP2 class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2019.
CrowdStrike is the “official cybersecurity partner” of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, which was also hit by the outage Friday.
Kurtz lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona with his wife and son.
