• A faulty CrowdStrike update caused a global technical outage on Friday.
• George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, has been down this path before.
• As CTO of McAfee, Kurtz was involved in a similar technology disaster in 2010.

Much of the world came to a standstill on Friday, resulting in one of the largest technical outages ever.

The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers and other sectors after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, released a faulty update.

Many industries were still reeling from the disaster on Saturday, and the aftermath is expected to last for weeks.

CrowdStrike admitted it made a mistake and offered an apology and workaround Friday. But the company has yet to detail how a destructive update was released without being detected by testing and other security efforts.

Naturally, the blame is now being placed on the man at the center of the matter: George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike.

Technology analyst Anshel Sag noted that this isn’t the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT crisis.

On April 21, 2010, antivirus company McAfee released an update to software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and restart repeatedly. Like the CrowdStrike flaw, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.

Kurtz was McAfee’s chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And a few months after that, Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been CEO ever since.

“For those who don’t remember, back in 2010, McAfee had a massive outage with Windows XP that took down much of the Internet,” Sag wrote on X. “The guy who was CTO of McAfee at the time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike.”

CrowdStrike did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.