CrowdStrike Shorts Won Big After Stock’s Outage-Fueled Plummet

CrowdStrike (CRWD) short sellers made more than $373 million Friday after a defective update sent out by the cybersecurity company caused a global IT outage for Microsoft (MSFT) Windows hosts, according to research firm S3 Partners.

The global outage sent CrowdStrike shares tumbling Friday, with the stock finishing down more than 11%.

S3 Partners said CrowdStrike shorts were “the big winners” of Friday’s incident, gaining over $373 in mid-day mark-to-market profits. In the same period, Microsoft shorts gained around $126 million, while shorts in the software systems sector were up $414 million one day mark-to-market profits on Friday.

The firm found that there is $48 billion of short interest in the systems software sector. Microsoft accounted for more than half of the the total short exposure in the sector, followed by CrowdStrike. S3 Partners said they expect to “see continued short selling in this sector.”

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company had identified the source of the outage and deployed a fix.

Microsoft shares fell less than 1% on Friday.