CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.

Is CrowdStrike publicly traded?
Yes. CrowdStrike Holdings trades on NASDAQ under ticker CRWD and joined the S&P 500 in June 2024.

Who founded CrowdStrike?
George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston founded CrowdStrike in 2011 in Irvine, California. Kurtz remains CEO.

Where is CrowdStrike headquartered?
Austin, Texas, since 2021. The company was originally based in California and operates a remote-first model.

What happened in the July 2024 outage?
A defective Falcon sensor content update crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide on July 19, 2024, disrupting airlines, hospitals, and businesses. CrowdStrike remediated, faced congressional scrutiny, and rebuilt its deployment processes.

What does CrowdStrike sell?
The Falcon cybersecurity platform: endpoint protection (EDR/XDR), identity security, cloud security, SIEM/log management, threat intelligence, and incident response services, sold as subscription modules.

What is CrowdStrike's revenue?
Approximately $4.7 billion in fiscal 2026 (year ended January 2026).

George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California, in 2011. Kurtz had run McAfee's worldwide technology operations, and Alperovitch brought threat-intelligence expertise; the founding premise was that signature-based antivirus was structurally obsolete.

The company raised venture capital through the 2010s (investors included Google Capital, Accel, and Warburg Pincus) and gained early prominence attributing major nation-state intrusions, most famously identifying Russian intelligence as responsible for the 2016 Democratic National Committee breach.

CrowdStrike went public on NASDAQ in June 2019 under ticker CRWD in one of the year's largest tech IPOs. The Falcon platform expanded modularly through the early 2020s: identity protection (Preempt acquisition), log management (Humio, later LogScale), and cloud security. Annual recurring revenue grew from under $100 million at IPO to more than $4 billion.

The defining crisis came July 19, 2024, when a faulty Falcon sensor content update caused roughly 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide to crash, grounding airlines, disabling hospitals, and halting broadcasters. CrowdStrike's response, rapid remediation, congressional testimony, and structural changes to update deployment, restored customer confidence. Fiscal 2026 still delivered record revenue, and the company was added to the S&P 500 in 2024, though the outage remains the most scrutinized event in its history.

July 2024 Global Outage: A defective content update crashed approximately 8.5 million Windows devices, causing billions in economic losses across airlines, hospitals, and enterprises. The event produced congressional testimony, shareholder lawsuits, and regulatory scrutiny. CrowdStrike accepted responsibility, deployed remediations, and restructured its update pipeline with staged rollouts and customer controls.

Attribution Criticism: Its high-profile nation-state attribution work has periodically drawn skepticism from security researchers about methodology confidence, a debate normal for the intelligence field.