Google owner Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) cut its stake in cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) well before the global outage caused by a software update, a regulatory filing showed on Friday.
The company decreased its holdings to 427,895 class A shares from 855,789 shares as of June 30, per the filing.
CrowdStrike shares fell 2.5% in premarket trading.
Last month's global tech outage, following a CrowdStrike software update, disrupted computer systems worldwide, affecting industries such as healthcare, banking, and aviation.
CrowdStrike provided information to resolve the issues, but experts noted that restoring systems would take time as it required manually removing the flawed code.
Experts said that CrowdStrike's routine update of its widely used cybersecurity software apparently lacked adequate quality checks before deployment, Reuters reported last month.
The latest version of its Falcon sensor software was intended to improve system security against hacking by updating the threats it defends against. However, faulty code in the update files led to one of the most extensive tech outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows operating system.
Issues surfaced quickly after the update's rollout on Friday, with users posting images on social media of computers showing blue screens with error messages, commonly known as "blue screens of death."
A security researcher specializing in operating system threats said their analysis pinpointed the code responsible for the outage.
"The problem was in a file that contains either configuration information or signatures," the researcher explained. These signatures are code that detects specific types of malicious code or malware.
According to cloud risk firm Parametrix, the outage resulted in $5.4 billion in direct losses. The healthcare sector was hit hardest, with a $1.9 billion loss, while the banking industry suffered a $1.4 billion loss. Companies in each affected industry are expected to average a loss of $43.6 million each.