CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD) has become a company that is almost everywhere. You probably don’t even know the services you use rely on the company. And in the last 72 hours it became a household name, just not in a good way. The saying “There is no such thing as bad publicity” is farcical at best. In the case of CrowdStrike, the bad publicity is really bad.
Now that you probably just found out how dependent businesses are upon CrowdStrike, what about the business itself? What about its customers? What about its existing shareholders? And is CrowdStrike worth a gamble for new money in the midst of a massive outage and plunge in its stock? Banking, flights, health, insurance, restaurants, retail, hotels and so on. Many of them went dark when CrowdStrike conducted its system upgrade.
CrowdStrike shares were trading at $343.05 last Thursday. Then they fell to $304.96 on Friday, then to $263.91 on Monday. That’s a whopping 23% in two trading day. If it was the stock market as a whole suffering that loss it would be considered a market crash.
The real issue now is what this all means for CrowdStrike going forward. Is the company losing its customers left and right? Is it temporary? Will everyone move on and forget this outage? Will CrowdStrike have to pay damages to its customers? Will anyone know if the CrowdStrike team can be trusted for future software upgrades? Was it a hack in disguise?
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) also has its role here. Its shares have been largely unscathed so far, at least outside of an initial sharp drop and full recovery last Friday.
Many analysts have chimed in on CrowdStrike’s woes. Some actual downgrades have been seen, but most firms have so far stuck by their ratings with lower target prices based on the disruption. These are only the synopsis of the reports that have so far been tracked:
- Morgan Stanley (Overweight) cut its price target to $396 from $422
- RBC Capital Markets (Outperform) cut its price target to $380 from $420.
- Wells Fargo (Overweight) cut its price target to $350 from $435.
- Canaccord Genuity has so far maintained both its Buy rating and the $405 price target.
- Piper Sandler (Neutral) cut its price target to $310 from $400.
But… There are some actual analyst downgrades full of caution and regret:
- BTIG downgraded CrowdStrike to Neutral from Buy.
- Guggenheim downgraded CrowdStrike to Neutral from Buy.
- Scotiabank downgraded CrowdStrike to Sector Perform from Outperform and slashed its price target to $300 from $393.
Investors should take note that CrowdStrike’s 10-times volume spike was seen for two days and the second day was actually worse in raw trading volume than the first — 42.14 million shares on Friday and 49.37 million shares on Monday. That’s larger than any days in the last year, and it is a rare day for it to see 10 million shares trading hands.
Meanwhile, shares of SentinelOne Inc. (NYSE: S) have seen a gain as customers are reported to be (and understandably) looking for alternatives to CrowdStrike after the outage. SentinelOne shares rose 6.7% to $23.18 on Monday as traders bought up the stock. Whether or not customers truly flee by firing CrowdStrike remains to be seen.
This looks like it may be the start of a binary situation due to the severe volume spike. CrowdStrike either recovers and this just ends up being a short dark chapter in an otherwise upbeat book — or this becomes the key reason customers will fire the company and avoid the company in the future.
