I hold no love for investors (even though pension funds rely on them, as shown by the lead plaintiff), but this seems pretty warranted if the company makes claims which are contrary to reality.
even though pension funds rely on them, as shown by the lead plaintiff)
Bro. Pension fund is an investor category. A major one after owner class.
This is called “securities fraud” and I think this would be a straightforward case.
Just give them a $10 Uber Eats card!
CEO resigns in 3…2…
[S]hareholders said they learned that CrowdStrike’s assurances about its technology were materially false and misleading when a flawed software update disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world.
I don’t see how they can make this argument.
Falcon is a kernel module. When kernel modules fuck up, you get kernel panics.
Sure, the layperson may not know enough about computers to recognize this, but it’s a basic enough fact about operating systems that an investor in a company like this should take the time to learn. It’s not like they hid that fact.
If you invested in a company without knowing how their product works, that’s on you.
There are kernel modules, and then there are kernel modules.
Based on conversations from the CTO of sentinel one, a crowdsrike competitor, the crowdstrike client is intentionally engineered with a lot of and way deeper hooks then most of the industry. This makes their engine powerful and very dangerous. The other vendors in the space touch the kernel as little as possible, moving everything they can into userspace to minimize any possible damage.
The fact that crowdstrike was fully in the kernel and then running basically no tests while deploying updates is the reckless fuck up.
You highlighted the wrong portion of this article.
The complaint cites statements including from a March 5 conference call where Kurtz characterized CrowdStrike’s software as “validated, tested and certified.”
If the CEO is making claims that the software is tested and certified, then the CEO should be able to prove that claim, no matter where the software lives. It is very reasonable to say, at face value, the CrowdStrike testing pipeline was inadequate. There is a remote possibility that there were mitigating factors, eg some other common software update released right before from another vendor that contributed; given CrowdStrike’s assurances and understanding of where it falls in most supply chains I consider that to be bullshit. I personally haven’t seen anything convincing that shows a strong and robust CI pipeline magically releasing this issue.
Now shareholder lawsuits are bullshit in general and, as someone constantly pushed to release without fucking any confidence, I think it’s really fucking dumb to ever believe any software passes any inspection until you have actually looked at the CI/CD process in-depth.
I mean it was true. It’s just that here was a bug with the automated testing software that let the bogus file go through.
They could have shown their testing/certification pipeline to investors, but it wouldn’t have changed anything unless investors would have somehow been able to figure out there was a bug in what they showed them.
Everytime cases like this pop up all I can think of is all the times people have justified investors making so much money because of the risks they take. But whenever that gamble is a loss they pull this shit
I’m perfectly fine with it if they want to sue the company but I don’t want these assholes to be bailed out by the government like SVB bullshit.
If the CEO was lying to the investors that’s akin to being lied to about the odds of a slot machine. It should totally be prosecutable.
At the same time I don’t feel sorry for them, and think they should be last in line after all the other victims
What I’m about to say is coming directly from my own asshole, so if someone actually knows what they’re talking cares to explain why I’m wrong, I’m open to hearing it.
This feels like an attempt to try extract as much capital as possible before other civil lawsuits and/or regulatory actions are able to do to the same.
It certainly is, everyone is queuing up.
I wonder how many trillions of lost dollars and lives being lost it will take before critical software like this is held to a higher standard. Between airliners crashing and financial and public infrastructure being taken down by security flaws and easily found bugs even though it’s just as important as the development team that writes the code, QA and a software dev process is still treated as unimportant and something you do only if you have the time to do it.
And yet, they are hiring. Job openings popping up on LinkedIn… Who would apply?
I almost did before the outage. Their pay was pretty low compared to similar positions at other companies though.
Why should shareholders get to sue anybody?
They invested and supported a company that caused this. They didn’t do their due diligence and made bad investments based solely off what they were told they could financially GAIN.
This is not the ideal outcome of investing, and it is entirely their own fault.
I’d like to sue the shareholders for enabling such malfeasance. A class action suit with several billion cosigners. Fuck these leeches.
Because companies have a feduciary duty to their shareholders and this is how it’s enforced.
