CrowdStrike Wins Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail

CrowdStrike was awarded the 2024 Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail, with President Michael Sentonas delivering the acceptance speech himself. Sometimes the best thing to do is to hang in there, admit mistakes, and accept defeat.

This year’s Pwnie Awards ceremony took place on Saturday at the DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas. Now in its 17th year, the Pwnie Awards recognize the best achievements and biggest failures in technology security from the past year.

So this year’s winner was obvious: CrowdStrike. More than 8.5 million Windows computers went down in July after the cybersecurity company released a software update, bringing numerous businesses and services around the world to a sudden halt. Affected businesses included banks, airlines, postal carriers, supermarkets, and telecommunications companies.

The CrowdStrike outage was a global event, and now comes with a giant Pwnie Award trophy. The two-tiered trophy awarded to CrowdStrike dwarfs the smaller pony-shaped trophies awarded to the other categories, outlining the magnitude of the fiasco.

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“It’s certainly not an award I’m proud to receive,” Sentonas said in his acceptance speech, taking the stage to laughter and applause. “I think the team was surprised when I said we were going to receive it so soon. We got it badly wrong. I’ve said that many times. It’s so important to acknowledge when you do something right and it’s so important to acknowledge when you do something badly wrong, like this time.”

Centonas said he will accept the large gold trophy and put it on display at CrowdStrike’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, and hopes it will serve as a lesson to CrowdStrike staff to avoid such mistakes in the future.

“The reason I wanted the trophy is because I’m heading back to HQ,” Centosas continued. “I’m going to take it home and put it in a proud place for all the Crowdstrikers that come to work to see. Our goal is to protect people, and we were wrong, and I want everyone to understand that this shouldn’t happen. That’s what this community is about, so I want to thank you from that perspective.”

Sentonas’ acceptance of CrowdStrike’s Pwnie award in person was widely well received, with social media users praising him for accepting the responsibility with humility, dignity and humour.

CrowdStrike was the only nominee for 2024’s Most Epic Fail Pwnie Award

While CrowdStrike’s Most Epic Fail trophy was only awarded this weekend, the award was actually announced alongside its Pwnie Award nominations in late July, just days after the infamous global outage that brought down numerous businesses and services around the world.

At the time, in a post on X, the Pwnie Awards said they were handing out the awards early due to “extenuating circumstances,” which was likely the fact that CrowdStrike’s failure was so great that no one could ever match it unless they deliberately tried. Even so, it’s still a tall order.

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While there were three finalists in every other category in the 2024 Pwnie Awards, CrowdStrike had no competitors in the Epic Fail Award, instead the nominee details for that category simply read, “LOL. That makes me laugh.”

“This award recognizes defenders who dared to ask, ‘What on earth could go wrong?'” reads the Pwnie Awards’ Most Epic Fail Award description. “The award celebrates an epic failure by an individual or entity that lets the entire information security industry down. It could be an isolated incident, marketing material, investment, or the smoldering remains of a whale-sized failure.”

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was the winner of last year’s most epic fail when hackers discovered the agency’s no-fly list on an insecure server, but at least the agency can say the mistake didn’t take down its IT systems around the world.