Beyond the blue screen: Parametrix puts a price on CloudStrike crisis
On July 19, 2024, the largest IT outage in history grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air, and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers. The company responsible was CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that protects its clients from threats by continuously and automatically updating software on its machines. But a buggy update triggered a vast sea of “blue screens of death” on the Windows computers “protected” by the Austin-based software provider.
Operations at Amazon, Delta and Safeway all ground to a halt.
Reporters struggled to communicate the sheer scope of the CrowdStrike catastrophe.
When the news broke, Bospar contacted Parametrix, a pioneer of parametric technology downtime insurance, with a simple message: This could be your biggest opportunity to make a name for yourself.
We knew the client well. We provided public relations services for the company’s launch in 2022, securing back-to-back Wall Street Journal features detailing how the Israeli startup would disrupt the insurance industry by underwriting against digital supply chain interruption.
Challenge
We reasoned that Parametrix could provide unparalleled insights into the financial impact of the CrowdStrike catastrophe based on its real-time monitoring of 6,000 technology businesses,
including a significant portion of the Fortune 500.
Our pitch to the client was urgent, with three PR goals:
- Communicate the scope of the CrowdStrike catastrophe while the news is still fresh.
- Educate journalists about the nature of the problem so they understand, as our dependence on technology increases and coalesces around single points and providers, these events can and will happen again.
- Make the case that enterprises must protect themselves with technologies such as Parametrix.
Three days after the CrowdStrike disaster was first reported, Bospar cemented an agreement with the client and immediately started outreach!
Strategy
Bospar began by reviewing 54 billion data points, and quickly realized that we needed to focus on a smaller data set! We chose to focus on the Fortune 500 because this group of companies is a key driver of the global economy.
About 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced disruptions due to the CrowdStrike outage. The most heavily impacted industries were airlines, healthcare and banking.
Parametrix estimated a total loss of $5.4 billion for the Fortune 500. Insured losses were expected to fall between $540 million and $1.08 billion, representing 10% to 20% of the total financial loss. That left companies with the brunt of the fiscal damage.
The breaking nature of this story demanded agility in our media approach. The first wave of stories would describe the scope of the damage caused by the outage. Parametrix’s numbers would be critical.
However, new angles would emerge, such as discovering what caused the outage, stock market performance and even a cringeworthy moment where CrowdStrike tried apologizing to its customers by giving them a $10 Uber Eats voucher.
Our research would add color to each narrative. We approached each vertical, including the airline, banking, cybersecurity, insurance and healthcare media, with a customized narrative for each particular audience.
On top of that, we had a more enduring technical story to tell: This is just the beginning; it will happen again. The ideal opportunity for such a narrative would arrive near the end of the news cycle, when journalists would have time to examine the lessons learned from this fiasco.
We needed to explain to reporters that when a critical component within a tightly bundled solution experiences downtime or fails, it can trigger a cascade of disruptions throughout the entire system.
But that’s not all. We needed to set new expectations for the industry. Enterprises should start demanding downtime insurance as a standard offering, especially for critical services like cybersecurity.
Bospar’s successful PR campaign secured an astounding 762 stories in one month from July 22 to August 23, 2024, roughly 25 stories daily, with more than 7.5 billion total unique monthly visitors! That coverage was included in outlets representing a deep mix of mainstream news, insurance, security and tech. Below is a partial list of outlets and journalists who covered the client:
- AOL
- Axios (Sam Sabin)
- BBC News (Chris Vallance)
- CBS News (Megan Cerullo)
- CFO Dive (David Jones)
- CIO Dive (David Jones, Roberto Torres, Lindsey Wilkinson)
- CNBC (Jordan Novet, Ari Levy)
- CNN (Brian Fung and Etienne Laurant)
- Computerworld (Jonny Evans, Viktor Eriksson, Mikael Markander, Apple Holic)
- CRN (Kyle Alspach)
- Cybersecurity Dive (David Jones, Lindsey Wilkinson)
- Dark Reading (Robert Lemos)
- Fortune (Lionel Lim)
- Government Technology (Dan Lohrmann)
- Inc (Will Swarts)
- InformationWeek (Shane Snider)
- Insurance Business (Althea Javellana, Gia Snape)
- Insurance Journal (Chad Hemenway)
- InsuranceInsider (Rachel Dalton)
- InsuranceTimes (Clare Ruel)
- Investopedia (Naomi Buchanan)
- MarketWatch (Weston Blasi)
- Medium (Taylor Armerding, Everest Moll, Monodeep Mukherjee)
- MedCity News (Katie Adams)
- MSN
- Nasdaq
- New York Post (Taylor Herzlich)
- PC Gamer (Andy Edser)
- Quartz (Rocio Fabbro)
- Reinsurance News (Beth Musselwhite, Jack Willard)
- Reuters (Carolyn Cohn, James Pearson)
- San Francisco Business Times
- SecurityWeek (Eduard Kovacs)
- Seeking Alpha (Doug Noland)
- Silicon Republic (Vish Gain)
- SiliconANGLE (Maria Deutscher)
- TechRadar (Craig Hale)
- The Guardian (Nick Robins-Early)
- The Insurance Insider (Jai Singh)
- The Motley Fool (David Jagielski)
- The Washington Post (Joseph Menn, Aaron Gregg)
- USA Today (Bailey Schulz)
- Yahoo! News
Shortly after the outage, our client became the central narrative in media coverage:
- Reuters’ James Pearson covered our news first: “The financial cost was also starting to come into focus on Wednesday. Insurer Parametrix said U.S. Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, will face $5.4 billion in losses as a result of the outage.”
- CNN’s Brian Fung followed: “The health care and banking sectors were the hardest hit by CrowdStrike’s mishap, with estimated losses of $1.94 billion and $1.15 billion, respectively, said Parametrix, the cloud monitoring and insurance firm behind Wednesday’s analysis.”
Soon, journalists moved away from cost to consequences:
- The New York Post’s Taylor Herzlich noted: “Cyber insurance policies will likely cover no more than 10% to 20% of the losses, or between $540 million and $1.08 billion, Parametrix said, since many of the companies have large risk retentions.”
- Weston Blasi of MarketWatch wrote, “The CrowdStrike outage could prove one of the most costly tech outages in history. Fortune 500 companies are facing $5.4 billion in financial losses, according to cloud-monitoring company Parametrix, with banking ($1.15 billion) and healthcare ($1.94 billion) being among the most severely impacted.”
In August, Bospar pitched the technical narrative:
- On Aug. 16, Parametrix’s Chief Commercial Officer Sharon Haran appeared live on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” with Reporter Arabile Gumede: “We definitely see an increase in interest among companies’ insurers trying to better understand how this digital value chain is built and how they could protect themselves against failures in different parts of the value chain.”
- On August 23, CIO.inc published Rahul Neel Mani’s long-form interview with Parametrix CEO Jonathan Hatzor, with a warning about the next outage: “The recovery time for legacy businesses such as airlines and hospitals was much longer compared to tech-oriented companies. CIOs and CISOs should tailor their risk mitigation strategies to cover all three important aspects: managing, mitigating, and transferring risks.”
The client’s sales pipeline dramatically increased from PR securing 762 stories from July 22 to Aug. 23, 2024.
The client’s brand awareness also increased, and Google Analytics reported spectacular increases in website traffic. New visitors to our client’s website shot up 283.2%. The news page blew up 5,700%, and searches for “CrowdStrike analysis” increased by 25,000%. Backlinks also spiked: One link was shared socially over 127,000 times.
Comments from LinkedIn followed suit, up 250%, and reposts were up 171.4%.
The client was thrilled!
“Our collaboration with the Bospar team was key in securing high-quality media coverage and amplifying the impact of our CrowdStrike outage analysis. Their expertise has directly translated into higher brand awareness and improved engagement across our marketing channels.”
— Tessa Culbertson, Parametrix’s marketing and communications lead
About the author
Nick Yacenko is an Account Supervisor at Bospar. His experience has brought him to different walks of the public relations industry, from B2B technology such as HR Tech, APIs, cyber security, web3, AI and SaaS to consumer products, lifestyle, travel, and celebrities. His experience includes publicizing pink pineapples, dartboards, waterparks, ski resorts, and top actors, athletes and artists. He has also honed his craft in analyst relations, securing countless client briefings. Nick earned his bachelor’s in Communications and his master’s in Communications and Media from Rutgers University. He resides in Northern New Jersey with his fiance and their two kittens, Mango and Simon.
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