Analysis: How CrowdStrike mastered the comeback

The cybersecurity giant did more than just harden its processes after the 2024 outage - and has emerged stronger as a result

CRN’s Kyle Alspach’s examines how CrowdStrike went from market pariah to competition-beating success story in under 18 months.

In October 2024, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told our sister site CRN he believed the company could come back stronger than before the widely felt outage a few months earlier.

That may have sounded like a CEO trying to put the best possible spin on a tough situation - which involved unprecedented global disruptions from an IT outage, including for air travel and healthcare - but Kurtz’s statement was much more than that.

It certainly helped that the response from CrowdStrike was immediate and thorough.

Partners and customers alike were able to move beyond the incident relatively quickly, GuidePoint Security’s SVP of sales, Jason Braun, said during CrowdStrike’s recent Partner Summit.

Many customers directly told him they wanted to stick with CrowdStrike because the vendor had “saved” them from potentially devastating attacks numerous times.

“The trust that [CrowdStrike has] instilled in the community - not only in this wonderful ecosystem, but with the end users - why wouldn’t I get behind it?” Braun asked.

In other words, along with the hardening of its processes to prevent a recurrence of the issue, CrowdStrike also had a stellar track record that made recovery easier.

That deep level of trust with customers and partners simply couldn’t be shattered by a single incident, even one with the magnitude of the 2024 outage.

In terms of CrowdStrike’s comeback, the numbers tell a similar story.

The vendor has consistently beaten Wall Street expectations on its quarterly results ever since the outage.

And while the company’s stock price took a major hit in the aftermath, it has recovered all of that ground and then some.

Shares in the company were trading around $532 Thursday morning, 55% higher than on the day before the outage a year and a half ago. That gives CrowdStrike a market capitalisation of $133.57 billion, just ahead of Palo Alto Networks at $133.38 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.

What that means is that CrowdStrike not only made up for its steep share-price losses, but has even passed one of its closest rivals on valuation, thanks to strong growth and massive opportunities ahead.

There’s also one example of some especially savvy decision-making by CrowdStrike in the immediate aftermath that’s worth highlighting here.

CrowdStrike provided free product compensation to customers following the incident, which is estimated to have cost the largest companies tens of millions of dollars - but that’s not the interesting part.

What’s noteworthy is how the company managed to make the most of even that process as a way to strengthen its business and opportunities for partners.

While providing product compensation to customers, the natural move was to do this through the vendor’s Falcon Flex subscription model for easier procurement, Kurtz told me recently.

The Flex programme, says CrowdStrike, provides a number of advantages to customers meant to incentivise consolidation on CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform.

What ended up happening, however, is that the move to connect the Flex model with compensation for the incident meant a whole lot more customers were introduced to a programme that has been a growth driver for both CrowdStrike and the channel.

As a result, “we accelerated the adoption of Falcon Flex because of the incident,” Kurtz said. “In one fell swoop, we got a lot of customers [onto Flex] very quickly.”

Finding that particular silver lining is just one of the many things CrowdStrike got right in the last 16 months.

The 2024 outage was certainly unprecedented - but CrowdStrike’s comeback could be described exactly the same way.

This article originally appeared on CRN.