CrowdStrike shuts down airlines, banks, supermarkets, causing stocks to suffer $20bn wipe-out

The company at the centre of a global outage that has shut down airlines, banks and supermarkets is tanking in the markets and looks set to suffer a massive $20bn wipe-out.

The cyber security company at the centre of a global IT outage that has shut down airlines, banks and supermarkets is haemorrhaging billions in value, with shares in the publicly listed firm down a whopping 16 per cent in pre-market trading.

CrowdStrike, a $125bn US-listed company, could lose up to $20bn in value when the New York markets open later tonight, with shares in the company tanking following the outage that hit Australia on Friday.

The outage hit Australia about 3pm AEST, with millions of people reporting their computers shut down and showed a "blue screen of death". 

The company confirmed the outage is a result of a planned upgrade for Microsoft and has flagged it may be able to come to a solution shortly.

Microsoft users got the blue screen of death on Friday.

The issue comes from a “bluescreen error” that is a result of a CrowdStrike outage, with servers and devices getting stuck in “boot loops”.

The IT issue has affected multiple countries including New Zealand, Japan, India, the US and the United Kingdom.

Multiple businesses have been affected including media organisations such as News Corp’s global operations, the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and Network 10.

It has also hit EFTPOS services, airlines, banks and supermarkets, throwing the entire nation into chaos.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector has listed outages for Foxtel, NAB, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Me Bank and more.

Qantas was forced to delay some flights on Friday evening because of the issue but the flagship airliner is still flying.

CrowdStrike went public in 2019 and has rocketed up in value since then, with its share price climbing from about US$64 to about US$343 before Friday’s sudden slump.

The company’s provides cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data.

“Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities, all through a single, lightweight agent,” the company says on its website.

Microsoft is also trading lower on the news, with the US$3.2 trillion tech behemoth down about 3 per cent in pre-market trading.

Originally published as CrowdStrike shuts down airlines, banks, supermarkets, causing stocks to suffer $20bn wipe-out