It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. An update from cybersecurity-software company CrowdStrike appeared to cause outages for users of Microsoft Windows devices Friday, but it could be a boon for the company's rivals.
The issue hitting millions of devices appeared to be caused by an update from CrowdStrike, Microsoft employees and outside technology professionals told The Wall Street Journal. CrowdStrike didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early on Friday.
It could be a bitter blow for a company that has been a stock market darling recently, more than doubling over the past year. CrowdStrike shares were down 11%.
After establishing its market position in endpoint security -- protecting the connection between a corporate network and devices that workers use -- CrowdStrike has been broadening out into various areas such as cloud security, identity protection, and analytics.
Now peers threatened by its expansion could see an opportunity to strike back.
Palo Alto Networks stock was up 2.16%. Palo Alto is also broadening its own platform and is even offering to give away free access to certain features to rivals' customers, with the goal of taking a larger share of IT spending budgets over the long run.
Among other cybersecurity stocks, Fortinet rose 0.6%. Zscaler was gaining 1.4% and SentinelOne was up 7.85%.