CrowdStrike’s president, Michael Sentonas, surprisingly received a positive response from the DEF CON crowd after accepting the Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail. This came after the recent global IT outage caused by a faulty Falcon sensor update.
The award was a foregone conclusion, with the nominations list for the Pwnies released just days after the incident. The Epic Fail category even had placeholder nominations like “lol” and “lmao even.”
Despite the heavy criticism CrowdStrike received for its role in the major IT disruption, Sentonas embraced the embarrassment. He took the stage at DEF CON, confidently holding the oversized trophy, and addressed the issue directly.
“Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving,” Sentonas admitted. “We got this horribly wrong… It’s super important to own it when you do things well. It’s super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case.”
He explained his desire to take the trophy back to headquarters as a constant reminder of the company’s responsibility to protect people.
His candidness resonated with the audience, who responded with applause and cheers. It was a surprising show of support from a community whose work was likely disrupted by the outage.
