President, CrowdStrike
EXCLUSIVE: CrowdStrike prepared for compensation following massive tech outage
CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas has spoken exclusively to Sky News Australia following the massive outage last week which affected multiple businesses worldwide.
CrowdStrike’s President apologised for what happened last Friday when operations at some of the biggest companies around the world, including banks, supermarkets and airports, were thrown into chaos for hours as the outage brought down IT systems.
Mr Sentonas assured customers that the outage was due to a “mistake” rather than a cyber attack and will focus on “remediation”.
He also confirmed he is preparing to compensate c...
About Michael Sentonas
Michael Sentonas, president of CrowdStrike, has been a prominent spokesperson for the company in 2025, discussing the cybersecurity landscape and CrowdStrike's product developments. In a podcast on the company's European Threat Landscape Report, Sentonas described adversaries as "relentless" and "only getting smarter, faster, and more sophisticated." He noted that adversaries are using AI to create attacks that "once would've taken months and millions of dollars" for a dollar)Skip and that "the new malware today are prompts." At the company's Fal.Con 2025 conference, Sentonas discussed the "enterprise graph" as a single place to unify threat, asset, identity, and user data, and highlighted new capabilities including "Onum" for pushing detections closer to the edge and "Pangea" for securing AI journeys against prompt injection. He also stated that "integration needs to happen in the vendor community, not in the end user community." In January 2025, Sentonas discussed CrowdStrike's quarterly earnings, reporting ending ARR of $3.65 billion, up 33% year-over-year, and free cash flow of $322 million, up 35% year-over-year. He characterized the quarter as "really strong" and said customers are "buying more modules, deploying more capabilities and turning off other workloads and products from other vendors." In December 2024, following a global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update, Sentonas issued a public apology, stating, "We deeply apologize. I personally apologize for what happened — we got this very wrong." He clarified that the incident "wasn't a cyber attack" but a "logic flaw in the product."
Transcript (15 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:00
As the world deals with the fallout from last weekend's major IT outage, the company behind the failed software update has apologized while trying to explain what went wrong. Our resident tech expert Eftm Trevor Long spoke to the Australian CrowdStrike president in a Sky News exclusive interview.
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Trevor Long0:18
Millions of people around the world are hearing this name, CrowdStrike, for the first time. So just quickly, before we unpack what happened last week, explain to us what CrowdStrike is.
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Michael Sentonas0:27
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that is used by organizations around the world. We protect against some of the most complex attacks in the world, whether it's nation states targeting governments, targeting enterprises, or e-crime actors. And I'd just like to start off by saying, you know, we deeply apologize. I personally apologize for what happened. We understand the disruption and the distress that we caused a lot of people. And firstly, I think it's important to say we put out an update, which we do regularly and we've been doing for over a decade, and we got this very wrong.
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Trevor Long1:07
So an update caused the outage. How did that happen? How does a simple update which, as you say, you would regularly do given the world that you live in with security software, how does it happen? How does it break everything?
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Michael Sentonas1:18
In the cybersecurity world, we're defending against attacks that are coming very, very quickly, and we see the people behind these attacks coming up with techniques all the time where they're looking to find ways to make changes to those techniques so they can be successful in carrying out attacks. So our industry has to rapidly respond, and we're always looking to see if we can put out new techniques, new updates. The update that we put out, obviously as I said, we got wrong with some logic in that update. We've been using that technique for the better part of a decade, and in this case we made that mistake, which we have clarified what it was. It certainly wasn't a cyber attack. And I would say that we've learned a lot, and ultimately we have to get better, and we let our customers down, and that's something that we have to address.
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Trevor Long2:15
So if you do it regularly, on a literally regular basis, was this update not checked prior to being rolled out?
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Michael Sentonas2:23
Well, as mentioned, we do those updates all the time. So the technique that we use, we've been using for a decade, and that means we've stress tested it many times. When we do regular updates of the products, we do testing. And one of the things that we have to spend time on is work out what went wrong. Clearly, obviously something did. We identified what the issue was very quickly. We stopped that particular file from being propagated, but unfortunately a lot of people around the world did get access to that file, and what it did is it exposed a logic flaw which ended up in what the industry knows of and the experience that people had, which is a blue screen of death. We put in a fix very quickly, but that fix is to the file. It obviously didn't fix the machines that were impacted in the field, and we're now trying to remediate and help our customers get up and running as quickly as possible.
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Trevor Long3:18
We've had estimations of losses of $200 million in New South Wales. I saw one report today of a billion dollars around the world. You've recently celebrated being included in the S&P 500. How does CrowdStrike survive this as a business?
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Michael Sentonas3:32
Look, that conversation will be one that we talk about where people want to talk about losses, and that conversation has to happen, but the focus is on the remediation piece. I'm very positive that we've moved into a different phase in terms of remediation. We've been doing a lot of testing over the weekend. Obviously the focus was to look at who needs to be remediated first, what country and time zones should we be thinking about, and we'll make sure that we continue to support and look after our customers.
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Trevor Long4:06
All the questions in the last 24 hours, though, have been around either compensation or litigation. You're obviously prepared for that as the next phase of this?
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Michael Sentonas4:16
Absolutely. And as I said, those conversations have to happen and will happen. That phase will come after we get our customers remediated.
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Trevor Long4:27
What is your message to your customers?
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Michael Sentonas4:29
Look, where I started: we got it wrong, and I can't apologize enough. I think it's important to acknowledge that firstly this wasn't a cyber attack, this was a mistake that we made, and we will learn from that mistake. We've already started putting in processes to understand how to ensure that doesn't happen again. And our commitment to our customers is to work very closely with them, to demonstrate to them we understand what happened, to demonstrate to them and help them understand what exactly went wrong in this particular case. But I think the important part is really spending time to demonstrate how we make sure it doesn't happen again, and that's going to be the focus.
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Trevor Long5:14
Just finally, circling back to my original question around people who didn't know what CrowdStrike is, they're some of the people impacted who aren't your customers. What's your message to those people who couldn't buy a flight or couldn't buy their groceries on Friday here in Australia?
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Michael Sentonas5:28
Yeah, I truly apologize. On behalf of the company, but personally, I apologize. I understand the impact that it's had. I've spoken to a lot of people that have been impacted. I couldn't say it enough: we got it wrong. We have to do better. We'll learn and we'll demonstrate what we're going to do moving forward to ensure that this doesn't happen again.