PR director wanted at Crowdstrike

Crowdstrike the company responsible for the global IT outage that caused chaos for businesses around the world has advertised for a director of public relations.

The job ad posted about three weeks ago was looking for a PR director to be based at their North Sydney office.

One Aussie was quick to spot the ad and share it on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday after the crisis struck.

“CrowdStrike has been looking for a new PR boss, based in North Sydney. Any takers?” the post read.

The advertisement showed the company was looking for a director of public relations with experience in strategic communications experience.

The ad showed seven people had clicked the “apply” button.

The ad has since been taken down.

It is unknown if any of the seven applicants were successful, but one thing is for certain the company is facing a PR nightmare after what IT experts described as the worst IT outage they had ever seen.

“On the plus side their salary just went up,” one person commented.

“I have a specialty in issues and crisis management … reasonable fees, cheaper than the lawyers that will looking at some options,” another said.

“I hear you are looking for work Dom Perrotet,” another person said.

About 3pm AEST on Friday, computer systems around the world crashed after a cybersecurity update at Microsoft failed.

Office workers and customer-facing screens across the globe were faced with the blue screen of death.

Airlines, supermarkets, banks, media, petrol stations and other major businesses and retailers all came to a grinding halt causing widespread chaos.

It’s Aussie millionaire Mike Sentonas from Melbourne who is the global president of Crowdstrike, one of the best known cybersecurity companies in the world.

Crowdstrike provides data protection software, and it is believed to be one of its products, Falcon senator, that lead to the global outage.

News Corp reported that Mr Sentonas gave a “now-awkward interview” reminiscent of a PR lecture on how other companies should deal with IT breaches and crisis communication.

“If an organisation has been breached, I’ll often work with the team to coach them on how to deal with it,” he told Nine Newspapers.

“That could be how to deal with press, or avoiding coming out to say, ‘there’s a sophisticated adversary’.

“I try to coach people on being open and transparent about what happened and how you’re dealing with it, which is so critically important to the customer.

“You have to go to your customers and be upfront, and if you try to trivialise it, it won’t go well.”

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