On the CrowdStrike Outage and Its Aftermath

I'm taking some flak for having worked at CrowdStrike. It's understandable that folks feel this way. The outage was serious and historic. My wife's medical clinic couldn't access EMRs for a week. I asked to help her clinic, but she was worried about her coworkers knowing that I worked there.

Many others suffered like this.

The Fallout

After the incident, employees were targeted, CrowdStrike offices received threats, and extra security was hired. When a power transformer exploded by the DC office, people panicked and thought it was a bomb.

There was also an organized campaign to try to gather the names and addresses of CrowdStrike employees, and I had to ask HackerNews admins to remove some posts doxxing all my personal information. I removed all social media and stopped wearing company swag to not get attacked when walking to and from the office.

Family members reached out telling me that CrowdStrike was part of a conspiracy to help the Democratic Party, and that I was very likely to get scapegoated as one of the few conservatives working there. My only firearms are my West Point class pistols, but I was considering getting a concealed carry permit.

Why I Joined CrowdStrike

I started working at CrowdStrike because I wanted to help companies have more robust defenses against nation state threat actors stealing intellectual property. I thought that was a better way to serve society than FAANG.

I was thrown into a bunch of gnarly complex C++ kernel code, and I led a bunch of efforts to improve safety in the sensor. I was in the midst of one of these initiatives when the incident happened.

I wasn't responsible for the outage, and I honestly don't feel any personal guilt.

Why I Stayed, Then Left

After the incident, I stuck around for six months because I figured that the post-crisis period was the optimal time to force through the hardening I had been advocating for prior to the incident. I expended all my political capital arm twisting others to focus on stability over features and this ended up burning some relationships with colleagues.

I voluntarily resigned when I started to get pushback from others to focus more on feature delivery.

On Defending My Honor

I've got some reasonable tolerance for getting dunked on. Half of the big content creators on here were dunking on CrowdStrike after the incident.

However, I'm a West Point graduate and former Army officer. I am extremely conscientious and I will fight to defend my honor. If necessary, I will die with my fucking boots on.