CrowdStrike accepted the 2024 Pwnie Award for the most epic failure. President Michael Sentonas delivered an acceptance speech in person. Sometimes it’s best to just grit your teeth, admit your mistakes, and accept defeat.

This year’s Pwnie Awards ceremony took place on Saturday at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas. The Pwnie Awards are now in their 17th year and recognize some of the most outstanding achievements in technology security over the past year – but also the biggest failures.

Therefore, it was obvious that CrowdStrike would take home an award this year. Over 8.5 million Windows computers crashed in July after the cybersecurity company released an update to its software, bringing numerous businesses and services around the world to a sudden halt. Banks, airlines, postal services, supermarkets, and telecommunications companies were among those affected.

The CrowdStrike outage was a massive global event, and one that has now been recognized with a giant Pwnie Award trophy. The two-tiered trophy awarded to CrowdStrike dwarfed the smaller pony-shaped trophies in other categories, as befits the enormity of the failure.

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“This is definitely not an award to be proud of,” Sentonas said in his acceptance speech, taking the stage to laughter and applause. “I think the team was surprised when I immediately said I was coming to pick them up. We got this horribly wrong, we’ve said that several times. It’s super important to own up when you do something well, it’s super important to own up when you do something horribly wrong, which we did in this case.”

Accepting the large gold trophy, Sentonas said he plans to display it at CrowdStrike’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, and hopes it will serve as a reminder to CrowdStrike employees to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

“The reason I wanted the trophy is because I’m going back to HQ,” Sentosas continued. “I’m going to take the trophy with me, it’s going to have a place of honor because I want every CrowdStriker that comes to work to see it. Because our goal is to protect people and we got that wrong and I want to make sure everyone understands that this kind of thing can’t happen and that’s what this community is about. So from that perspective I want to say thank you.”

Sentonas personally accepted CrowdStrike’s Pwnie Award, with social media users praising him for taking responsibility with humility, class, and humor.

CrowdStrike was the only contender for the Most Epic Fail Pwnie Award 2024

Although CrowdStrike’s Most Epic Fail trophy was only awarded this weekend, their win was announced along with the Pwnie Award nominations in late July, just days after the infamous global blackout that brought down numerous businesses and services around the world.

In a post to X at the time, the Pwnie Awards stated that they were awarding the prize early due to “extenuating circumstances.” The circumstance in question was likely the fact that CrowdStrike’s failure was so epic that no one would be able to top it unless they tried to do so intentionally. Even then, it would still be a difficult task.

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While there were three finalists in all other categories of the 2024 Pwnie Awards, CrowdStrike had no competition for the Epic Fail Award. Instead, the nominees for this category simply read, “Lol. Lmao, actually.”

“This award is for the defenders who dared to ask, ‘What could possibly go wrong?'” reads the description of the Pwnie Awards’ Most Epic Fail Award. “This award recognizes the spectacularly epic failure of an individual or company – the kind of failure that lets down the entire infosec industry. It could be a single incident, a marketing piece or an investment – or a simmering trail of whale-sized failures.”

Last year’s Most Epic Fail award went to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after a hacker discovered its no-fly list on an unsecured server, but at least the TSA can claim that its mistake didn’t bring down IT systems around the world.