"Most Epic Fail" award: CrowdStrike President accepts it in person

The Pwnie Awards are presented every year at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas. These include a prize that is something like the Golden Raspberry for particularly big software fails. It is the "Most Epic Fail" award, which is reluctantly accepted. Not so this year. The president of CrowdStrike, Michael Sentonas, took the opportunity to accept the literally huge trophy in person with a pinch of humour.

This may be to his credit, especially as his company's mistakes led to a worldwide IT outage last month. Over 8.5 million Windows PCs and servers were paralysed by a faulty security update. Airports, banks, hospitals and many more were directly affected.

However, the President maintained his composure during the reception. What's more, he gets the audience to applaud with his speech:

Michael Sentonas emphasises that this is definitely not an award to be proud of. He believes his team was surprised when he said he was picking them up in person. His company had "done it horribly wrong". It's super important to admit things that are going well, as well as things that are going terribly wrong.

As for why he wanted the trophy so badly, he continues: "I'm going back to headquarters and I'm going to take the trophy with me. It will be in a place of honour because I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it." The aim of CrowdStriker is to protect people, "and we've done that wrong". He said he wanted to make sure everyone understood that things like this should not happen.

At the end, Michael Sentonas says thank you and the audience applauds. It remains to be seen whether this sympathetic acknowledgement of mistakes will also inspire those outside the audience. Following the disaster that gripped the world on the morning of 19 July and afterwards, CrowdStrike shares fell from USD 343 (18 July) to 217 (2 August). As of 12 August, it is 239 US dollars.