Tom Gerken
BBC News

We don’t yet know what is causing the IT outage affecting companies around the world.

But earlier today American Airlines blamed a “technical issue with Crowdstrike” – and now the Swiss cyber security office is pointing the finger, too (see previous post).

Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company founded
in 2011 with the aim of safeguarding the world’s biggest companies and hardware
from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

It specialises in endpoint security protection and
tries to prevent malicious software or files from hitting corporate networks
from devices that connect to them, such as phones and laptops.

It also aims to
protect the data of companies which have shifted from guarding it under their
own roof, or on their own servers, to so-called cloud providers.

The Texas-based firm was co-founded by
entrepreneurs George Kurtz, who remains chief executive, and Dmitri
Alperovitch. It listed its shares publicly on the tech heavy Nasdaq stock
exchange in 2019.

Since it first launched, the company has
seemingly played a key role in helping firms investigate cyber-attacks.

In 2016 Crowdstrike was called in by the US
Democratic National Committee, the strategy arm of the Democrat Party, to investigate a
breach into its computer network.