Full disclosure: I don't own any CrowdStrike stock nor do I own any derivatives related to CrowdStrike. Nevertheless, I'm planning to go short when enough greedy early shorts got burned by the likely rip the stock will have. This is not legal advice.
So, oh boy. I guess we all know what happens after your average tech company messed up bigtime. Some FAANG company getting caught doing anti-competitve stuff and being fined billions? No one cares. Microsoft apparently having horrendous security, getting their master key leaked and shit? I sleep. Google accidentally deleting one of their customers cloud infrastructure? Meh.
The thing is that most people don't even notice and they don't care. Uncle Bob who's running his logistics company couldn't care less about that IT nerd mumbo jumbo. Your aunt Alice who works as a surgeon in the ER barely knows how to search for something on the internet. But they are where a lot of the money sits.
Now enter the CrowdStrike disaster. Both Bob and Alice are likely to have been severely affected by that big fuckup. Bob's entire company IT is down, the sysadmin will need days to unbrick all those devices while the trucks are arriving one after the other but they have to wait indefinitely because who knows when the systems are up again and running. Bob looses a shitload of money that very day. Alice is stressed out af because their entire IT is down and the emergencies keep coming in but organizational things get messy due to the broken IT and people's lives are being put into danger just because someone at CrowdStrike pushed a bad update to production without testing. On a Friday.
What I want to illustrate with this is that this time it's something people care about. People with power and money. They are pissed off and want to know what that CrowdStrike thingy is and how they can get rid of that mess of a product that caused them a real headache for the near future. People will try to find alternatives. The trust has been destroyed. Installing a rootkit on your computer just get let it break your entire IT? Hell no. Even the boomers will understand that.
In that sense, I highly doubt CrowdStrike will recover quickly from this. It will be interesting to see what legal consequences they will have. One can hope that their insurance game is strong. Otherwise this will be bad. I anticipate heavy downward pressure in the short term. Trade with caution.
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