CrowdStrike Falcon is a leading cloud-native endpoint security platform. See 2026 pricing tiers, features and the July 2024 global outage explained.
CrowdStrike Falcon is a cloud-native cybersecurity platform delivered through a single, lightweight software agent installed on endpoint devices such as laptops, servers, and mobile devices. Rather than requiring multiple separate security tools, Falcon consolidates capabilities including next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, threat intelligence, identity protection, and cloud workload security into one integrated platform managed from the cloud.
Falcon launched in June 2013 as CrowdStrike's first commercial product and has since grown into one of the most widely deployed endpoint protection platforms among large enterprises, government agencies, and managed security service providers, contributing to CrowdStrike becoming a NASDAQ-listed company with billions of dollars in annual revenue.
CrowdStrike sells Falcon through tiered, per-endpoint, per-year subscription bundles. Falcon Go is the entry-level option built for small businesses and capped at 100 devices, bundling next-generation antivirus, USB device control, and mobile protection. Falcon Pro adds centralized firewall management on top of the Go bundle for mid-sized organizations with more complex needs.
Falcon Enterprise sits at the top of the self-service tiers, adding Falcon Insight XDR for real-time detection and response and Falcon OverWatch, a 24 by 7 managed threat-hunting service. List prices are published around 59.99, 99.99, and 184.99 dollars per device per year for Go, Pro, and Enterprise respectively, though large deployments typically receive volume discounts at set endpoint-count thresholds.
On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike distributed a faulty configuration content update, known as Channel File 291, to Falcon sensor software running on Windows machines worldwide. A defect in that file caused an out-of-bounds memory read in the Windows sensor client, which resulted in a kernel-mode crash on affected systems, and the flawed update had passed CrowdStrike's own validation checks due to a bug in its content verification software.
The result was widely described as the largest IT outage in history: an estimated 8.5 million Windows systems crashed and failed to restart properly, disrupting airlines, airports, banks, hospitals, broadcasters, retailers, and government services globally, with total financial damage estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike released a fix within hours, but many machines required manual remediation, so disruption continued for days at some organizations, and the company later published a detailed post-incident report on the root cause and its remediation steps.
Falcon is CrowdStrike's cloud-native, AI-powered cybersecurity platform that combines endpoint protection, detection and response, threat intelligence, and related security capabilities in a single lightweight agent.
A faulty Falcon sensor content update, Channel File 291, contained a defect that caused an out-of-bounds memory read and kernel-mode crash on Windows systems, affecting an estimated 8.5 million machines worldwide.
Yes, CrowdStrike Holdings trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CRWD and has been public since its June 2019 IPO.
Published list prices are roughly 59.99 dollars for Falcon Go, 99.99 dollars for Falcon Pro, and 184.99 dollars for Falcon Enterprise per device per year, with volume discounts available at scale.
CrowdStrike was co-founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston.
CrowdStrike is headquartered in Austin, Texas, having moved there from Sunnyvale, California in December 2021.
Yes, Falcon Go purchases are capped at a maximum of 100 devices, making it suited to small businesses.
The widely reported mass outage specifically affected Windows systems running the faulty Falcon sensor content update; the incident is documented as a Windows-specific event.