What is CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind the global Microsoft outages?

Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm headquartered in Austin, Texas, is linked to the Microsoft outage affecting airlines, banks and other businesses worldwide on Friday.

The company provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices, and many industries globally — from banking to retail to health care — use the company's software to protect against breaches and hackers.

The outages Friday were connected to "a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement. The issue was "not a security incident or cyberattack," he said, and Mac and Linux hosts were not affected.