Australian executive Mike Sentonas in midst of CrowdStrike chaos

The Australian who is now president of CrowdStrike, Mike Sentonas, had $30m wiped from his shares in one day after the stock was pummelled in the wake of the global outage.

A week after being appointed chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in 2020, Australian-born executive Mike Sentonas boasted to an IT conference in San Francisco its customers loved its product so much they would wear CrowdStrike T-shirts.

“CrowdStrike customers just welcome you with open arms … wanting to talk to you about what problems we can solve together, they love the technology,” he told the conference, “I spent a lot of time with people who had problems, and their security technology for 10 different reasons failed.”

Mr Sentonas happily added that when he began visiting CrowdStrike users in his new role he rocked up to their offices to see them wearing CrowdStrike T-shirts, such was the passion for the security product.

“I had the opportunity of going to speak to some of CrowdStrike’s big reference customers when I came over nearly four years ago and they talked a lot about why they loved it, they were wearing T-shirts – which is quite a strange thing when you first come in and you see people so passionate about the brand.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, when a glitch in CrowdStrike’s system triggered a global IT outage impacting media, airlines, supermarkets, hospitals and emergency services, and which now falls upon Mr Sentonas’s shoulders after he was made president of the cybersecurity company in March 2023.

And as he attempts to repair the global damage sparked from what should have been a regular upgrade of the CrowdStrike platform, Mr Sentonas is also wearing the bruises of around $US20m ($30m) in paper losses from his shares in the Texas-based security firm, one of the world’s leading providers of malware, ransomware and general internet security products.

According to the latest documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr Sentonas holds 411,166 shares, worth just over $125m. But the rout in the CrowdStrike share price since the global outage has seen him lose $US20m on paper – although in the last year its share price rose more than 100 per cent.

Mr Sentonas joined CrowdStrike in 2016 having known one of its founders, George Kurtz, for more than 10 years. The Australian IT executive has served in many leadership roles at CrowdStrike, including vice-president of technology strategy from 2016 to 2020 and chief technology officer from 2020 until his promotion to president in March 2023.

At the 2020 IT conference in San Francisco, Mr Sentonas said one attraction of the company’s cybersecurity products was the quick recovery and resumption of normal services after a security breach.

“Unfortunately some people that become CrowdStrike customers come to us because they have had a different product that failed, they have had an incident, they have had a breach, and asked us to help them with recovery,” he said. “When people do find themselves unfortunately having a problem, we can accelerate the time to help them recover as quickly as possible … get safe and secure, and get their business up and running again very, very quickly.”

As millions of Australians log on to their computers on Monday morning they will be praying Mr Sentonas’ words are true and they aren’t confronted with the “blue screen of death”.