Investing General Discussion

Araysar said:

Bro.... They literally blew up hundreds of millions of man hours of productivity in 24 hours and caused untold losses to thousands of companies.

Aside from the stonk taking a hit, I'm going to guess they're going to be paying damages for YEARS in to airlines, banks, etc. which will be compounding bad press and dragging down their profits. Do they have any direct competitors who can replace them at all these companies? I don't know, but if they do, that's lost revenue on top of lost profit.

I'd be very careful buying this.

As a personal anecdote my mom sent me a pic today. She was flying out of O'Hare airport on a United flight and the screen at her gate was still BSOD 2 days later.

Personally I think their brand and reputation is probably permanently poisoned. This was a huge fuck up.

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There are multiple competitors in their space, and more than a few that are honestly better than them. They had an early starter advantage and have been masterful with their marketing over that time. Which has blessed them over time with a certain level of market share dominance on top of their early/first mover advantage.

Of the 18 customers I support in my role I believe 13 are running Crowdstrike, all took the hit. A few are running their older competitors (like Carbon Black, MS Defender APT) who didn't suffer, but also aren't getting the tier of protection a shop running a modern EDR tool gets. And a couple are running modern EDR tools which aren't Crowdstrike, and of course they weren't affected. If you want to see the tools in their space that have done the best in third party testing, that exists....


The MITRE group does these tests every year, and openly publishes all the findings. That link shows Crowdstrike v. Palo Alto v. Microsoft, but you can pick and choose any three of the participants to compare. They're neutral and respected in the cybersecurity circles.

But one thing to remember is that virtually every vendor will, if they haven't already, have a "bad patch day" at some point. Question is how bad. How good their QA processes for their patches/updates are, and how hard it is to fix. In this case Crowdstrike had bad day which was also NOT an "easy to fix" bad day....

Araysar said:

Still no love for CRWD now that the smoke and dust cleared after the weekend

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I would say "survived the weekend". There are still a MASSIVE number of systems still down across the globe because of this. It will probably be late this week before we can say the global IT community has "recovered".

And seems the analysts have noticed... This morning's CRWD news...

Palum said:

And this is before they get sued, their sales get impacted, they get called to testify in front of congress, etc.

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As I mentioned, their sales are already being impacted in all probability since they will have had a lot of "close of FQ" deals supposedly signing and completing this week. Worst possible time for something like this to happen. And looking at where support levels for their stock are historically, they could easily tumble today and tomorrow to around 240 a share.

Only recent similar drop I can remember (for a competitor of Crowdstrike) is when PANW had an earnings call where they mentioned the move of the market towards platformitization (which means lower margins and valuation for point products) and they took a 28% hit in one day. CRWD was already on a 3 day 10% drop, then Friday happened, now this morning counting from last Tuesday CRWD is down 26%, and 18% of that is just Friday and this morning (so far).

In the "this was foretold in prophecy" file...