Crowdstrike CEO on when global IT outage will end: ‘Sorry, will take time’

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said that the global IT outage was caused by a single faulty content update. Apologizing for the tech glitch that resulted in major disruptions at banks, stock markets, supermarkets, airports and different sectors across the globe, he said, “We're deeply sorry.”

Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity service designed to stop internet breaches or hacks for the world's biggest companies.

Read more: Microsoft on global outage: Anticipate a resolution is forthcoming

"That update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system," he explained adding that the company has fixed the issue for now, "We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue."

He continued, “We have to go back and see what happened here. Our systems are always looking for the latest attacks from adversaries that that are out there.”

Asked whether it was a cyberattack, he said, "It wasn't a cyber attack. It was related to this, this content update."

Read more: Crowdstrike says global Microsoft outage caused by 'defect' in 'content update'

He also said that he and his team have had "a long night", but systems had been fixed at their end. But he also cautioned that it could take a while for everything to be back up and normal. He said, "So, it could be some time for some systems, it [won't] just automatically recover. But it's our mission... to make sure that every customer is fully recovered."

Read more: Crowdstrike may lose $16 billion- a fifth of its value- amid global IT outage

The IT security firm earlier said that it has identified the issue, isolated it and deployed a fix. It said, "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. 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."