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LONDON - American cyber-security company CrowdStrike became a household name for all the wrong reasons on July 19, after a The company’s stock fell more than 11 per cent on July 19 after an outage disrupted operations across multiple industries – shutting down public services, halting flights and forcing some broadcasters off the air. CrowdStrike – which previously reached a market cap of about US$83 billion (S$111 billion) – is among the most popular cyber-security providers in the world, with close to 30,000 subscribers globally. The firm has been a software darling for investors, due to its growth and high margin. Its stock had doubled in the past year before the July 19 slump. But the outage could force customers and investors alike to rethink their dependence on the company, opening the door to potential rivals like Palo Alto Networks, which saw its stock rise 1.7 per cent on July 19, and SentinelOne, which jumped as much as 3.6 per cent. “This event is a reminder of how complex and intertwined our global computing systems are and how vulnerable they are to a mistake and an error,” said Mr Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson. “While most companies don’t really have an alternative to Microsoft, they do have alternatives for security,” he added. “This may cause many companies to reconsider which security product they use, and whether they need to diversify across different security products in order to prevent these types of outages.” Security officials at various companies expressed dissatisfaction with CrowdStrike but did not disclose plans to stop working with the vendor, according to a person privy to the conversations. Analysts said that while the events on July 19 were damaging for CrowdStrike, they did not foresee competitors taking much market share as a result of the incident. “This is clearly a major black eye for CrowdStrike and the stock will be under pressure,” said Mr Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, but he noted that the incident stemmed from a technical update and not a hack or cyber-security threat, which he said would be “more worrying”. Analysts at JPMorgan said customers would initially be upset, but that the company had taken ownership of the issue. CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said in a post on social media platform X that the event was not a security incident or cyber attack, and a fix had been deployed. He later apologised for the impact caused by the company. “Outages happen, and the scale here is meaningful, but we think diligent handholding and efficient response from CrowdStrike will be helpful,” the JPMorgan analysts said. Mr Ben Bernstein, a former cyber-security investor who now runs security start-up Gusto, said he plans to stick with CrowdStrike for now. “You typically want to go to the larger companies where they have supposedly better processes. It’s about specific companies and interactions that people have with these companies, and if they feel they’re trustworthy,” said Mr Bernstein. REUTERS