CrowdStrike President, CEO and Co-Founder George Kurtz speaks at the WSJTECH Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California, USA on October 21, 2019.
Mike Black | Reuters
mass strike Shares of the company fell 13% in Monday trading as the cybersecurity software company continues to help customers across industries recover from network outages that cost millions of dollars. Microsoft The Windows device went offline last week.
Earlier on Friday, the company released a flawed update to its Falcon vulnerability protection software that crashed PCs, data center computer servers and monitors, grounding flights and canceling medical appointments. The incident left 8.5 million Windows devices in trouble, less than 1% of the global total. Microsoft said.
IT staff quickly repaired the computer. Meanwhile, hackers are trying to take advantage of the chaos, setting up Malicious website Software updates appear to be available. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz discussed the situation in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
CrowdStrike shares fell 11% on Friday. But then, over the weekend people shared photo A so-called “blue screen of death” displayed on social media on a Windows device is a sign that the computer needs administrator attention. CrowdStrike said Sunday it was testing a way to repair affected machines more quickly.
On Sunday, Guggenheim Securities downgraded CrowdStrike stock to neutral from buy. Analysts led by John DiFucci said the stock still trades at “the highest multiple of recurring revenue across our entire software coverage universe.”
Analysts wrote that CrowdStrike may need time to repair its image, the consequences of which could hurt signings. Signups are an early estimate of the value of new and existing customer contracts and can give investors an idea of a company’s revenue potential.
“We continue to have the utmost respect for CrowdStrike’s leadership team and believe the company will ultimately emerge stronger from this event, and that investors can weather this if they have a multi-year horizon,” they wrote. However, we find it difficult to tell investors that they need to buy CRWD now.”
Goldman Sachs maintained a buy rating on CrowdStrike stock in a report issued earlier Monday. But analysts at the investment bank said they expected the CrowdStrike deal to take longer to close between the time of the disruption and July 31, the end date of the software company’s fiscal second quarter.
Analysts led by Gabriela Borges wrote: “Our recent conversations reiterate our view that endpoint share changes following this event are likely to be minimal, although we recognize More details in the postmortem will further corroborate this view.
They point to a 2010 McAfee outage that crashed computers as a glimpse into what happened before last week’s incident. “The revenue impact due to the deferral was approximately $6 million, of which was not recognized on the balance sheet,” then-CEO Dave DeWalt told analysts on a conference call in July of that year. Deferred revenue, another $14 million in revenue was also negatively impacted. Intel acquired the antivirus company in 2011.
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