Edith Cowan University graduate Mike Sentonas to lead CrowdStrike through outage storm

An Australian tech guru will likely battle through a storm of chaos in the coming days and weeks as fallout from Friday’s global IT outage that crippled banks, supermarkets and airlines from Australia to the United States grows.

Melbourne man Michael Sentonas leads CrowdStrike, the publicly-listed cyber-security firm that caused the meltdown, alongside CEO and founder George Kurtz, after first joining the company in 2016 as vice president of technology strategy.

He served as chief technical officer from 2020 to 2023, when he was promoted to president of the widely-respected and growing company.

Mr Sentonas, a multi-millionaire, holds a bachelor in computer science from Edith Cowan University in WA.

The outage hit Australia about 3pm AEST, with millions reporting their computers had shut down and showed a “blue screen of death”.

The company confirmed the outage was a result of a planned upgrade for Microsoft.

CrowdStrike has said it may be able to come to a solution shortly.

The shutdown hit multiple countries including New Zealand, Japan, India, the US and the United Kingdom.

Multiple businesses have been affected including media organisations such as News Corp’s global operations, the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and Network 10.

It has also hit EFTPOS services, airlines, banks and supermarkets, throwing the entire nation into chaos.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector has listed outages for Foxtel, NAB, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Me Bank and more.

Qantas was forced to delay some flights on Friday evening because of the issue but the flagship airliner is still flying.

CrowdStrike, a $125bn US-listed company, could lose up to $12.5bn in value when the New York markets open later tonight, with shares in the company tanking 10 per cent in pre-market trading.

The company went public in 2019 and has rocketed up in value since then, with its share price climbing from about US$64 to about US$343 before Friday’s sudden slump.

The company provides cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data.

Its customers include private sector clients in the corporate world and also government and public service bodies.

“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 prioritised observability of vulnerabilities, all through a single, lightweight agent,” the company says on its website.

Microsoft is also trading lower on the news, with the US$3.2 trillion tech behemoth down about 1.4 per cent in pre-market trading.