Is CrowdStrike Stock Still a Buy After Its Big Bounce?

It was the kind of move you’d expect from a supervillain like Lex Luthor or Joe Exotic: Introduce a crippling bug into the software of airlines, banks, and hospitals – and then watch the ensuing chaos from the widespread system crashes. Planes grounded. Accounts frozen. Patients dead. OK, no one died as far as we know, but the inadvertent release of a faulty configuration update by cybersecurity superpower CrowdStrike (CRWD) for its Falcon sensor software on July 19, 2024, caused massive financial impacts when it shut down an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices globally.

Fortune 500 companies – more than 60% of which use CrowdStrike’s AI-powered cybersecurity platform – alone faced estimated losses of $5.4 billion, with only a fraction expected to be covered by insurance. Delta Air Lines, one of the hardest-hit companies, reported losses of about $500 million due to flight cancellations and disruptions. The total global financial damage has been estimated to be at least $10 billion. Consistently one of th