After causing a global IT system outage last week, the stock price of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, continued to plummet.

On Monday, July 22nd, Eastern time, CrowdStrike opened down 6.5% and the decline expanded to over 10% within half an hour of trading. It hit a new low of 261.59 US dollars at midday and fell more than 14% on the day, maintaining a decline of over 10%, which may be the largest drop since November 2022 and the lowest closing price since January 8th.

Wall Street news previously mentioned that the problem with CrowdStrike's software update caused Microsoft Windows system to crash last Friday, resulting in the largest global IT system outage in history which affected multiple banks, funds, asset management, and exchanges, and impacted the global supply chain. Industry experts claimed that air transportation may take several weeks to recover. Microsoft estimated last Saturday that the incident had affected 8.5 million Windows devices, less than 1% of the total global devices. Experts from the British Computer Society said that the damage caused by this incident may take several days or even weeks to repair.

The official explanation given by CrowdStrike is that the source of the large-scale system crash was due to the failure of its Falcon sensor software update. CrowdStrike's CEO, George Kurtz, told the media on Friday that IT personnel are starting to repair the computers. Meanwhile, some hackers attempted to take advantage of the chaos and set up malicious websites that appeared to provide software updates.

It seems that the aftermath of CrowdStrike's impact on the global technology system is not yet over. Until Sunday of last week, some netizens still posted on social media, revealing the so-called "blue screen of death" occurred at Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport in London. On the same day, CrowdStrike said that the company is testing a faster method to repair affected machines.

Air transportation is still under great disruption. Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, apologized for the thousands of flights canceled by the company on Monday. According to aviation data firm OAG, due to the IT system outage, Delta Air Lines canceled more than 4,600 flights from Friday to Sunday last week, which was more than other airlines. Flight tracking website FlightAware showed that Delta Air Lines canceled more than 700 flights on Monday morning, accounting for 19% of its mainline flight operations, and more than half of the total number of canceled flights in the United States.

Wall Street institutions have begun to issue warnings about CrowdStrike’s stock. Guggenheim Securities downgraded its rating on the stock from Buy to Neutral last Sunday. Analysts led by John DiFucci said that the stock is still trading at “the highest multiple of recurring revenue across our entire coverage universe,” and it may take some time for CrowdStrike to repair its image, which could affect the signing of contracts.

These analysts wrote in their report:

“We still have the utmost respect for CrowdStrike's leadership team and believe the company will emerge stronger over time from this event. It is hard for us to tell investors to Buy CRWD at this time, though, given the uncertainty over how long it will take the company to recover.”

Goldman Sachs maintained its Buy rating on CrowdStrike's stock in a report released on Monday. However, the bank's analysts said they expected that the company's trading would take longer to complete between the system outage and the end of its second quarter on July 31st.
Goldman Sachs' report read, "Our recent conversations have reconfirmed our view that there may be modest changes in endpoint share after the event—and we recognize that more details in post-analysis will further confirm this view."