Greek-Australian Tech Guru at the Heart of Global IT Outage Crisis

An Greek Australian tech executive is expected to navigate through significant turmoil in the wake of Friday’s global IT outage, which disrupted banks, supermarkets, and airlines from Australia to the United States.

Michael Sentonas, a Melbourne native, is at the center of the storm as he leads CrowdStrike, the cyber-security firm at the center of the meltdown, alongside CEO and founder George Kurtz. Sentonas, who joined the company in 2016 as vice president of technology strategy, served as chief technical officer from 2020 to 2023 before being promoted to president.

Sentonas, a multi-millionaire with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Edith Cowan University in WA, is now facing the fallout from the outage. The incident began around 3 pm AEST in Australia, with millions of users experiencing a “blue screen of death” on their computers. The outage was linked to a planned Microsoft upgrade, according to CrowdStrike.

The disruption has affected numerous countries including New Zealand, Japan, India, the US, and the UK, impacting various businesses and media organizations such as News Corp, the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9, and Network 10. Additionally, EFTPOS services, airlines, banks, and supermarkets have been thrown into chaos.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector reported outages affecting major institutions like Foxtel, NAB, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp Bank, Commonwealth Bank, and Me Bank. Qantas had to delay some flights on Friday evening, though the airline is still operational.

CrowdStrike, a $125 billion US-listed company, is projected to lose up to $12.5 billion in value when New York markets open, with shares plummeting 10 percent in pre-market trading. Since its public debut in 2019, the company’s share price had surged from about $64 to approximately $343 before the recent drop.

The company offers cloud-delivered protection for endpoints, cloud workloads, identity, and data. Its clients include private sector companies and government bodies.

CrowdStrike’s website describes its platform: “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.”

Microsoft has also experienced a drop in its share value, with the $3.2 trillion tech giant down approximately 1.4 percent in pre-market trading.