Close to four days since 8.5 million computers went into the “Blue Screen of Death” last Friday and the man who leads the company behind the outage has spoken for the first time about what went wrong, and what’s next for the publicly listed business at the centre of it all.

Michael Sentonas is the Australian man who holds the title of President at Crowdstrike, the stockmarket listed company which has seen it’s value slashed by around 30% since the outage leaving it with a market capitalisation of $72 Billion USD.

Mr Sentonas has spent the weekend talking with the company’s major clients and working with their software teams to not only smooth things over but find a path forward for the business and their clients.

I sat down with him on a video call to discuss the outage in an Interview for Sky News Australia, and his sombre appearance spoke volumes. He was quick to issue a direct apology for the incident, saying “I’d just like to start off by saying, we deeply apologise. I personally apologise for what happened. We understand the disruption and the distress that we caused a lot of people. “

His own concise summary of the incident followed.

“I think it’s important to say we put out an update, which we do regularly, and we’ve been doing for over a decade. And we got this very wrong. “

Fortunately, the cause is known and the company is now in remediation mode, Sentonas saying “We understand how it happened and certainly I can’t apologise enough. We’re working with organisations to get things up and running and get people remediated as quickly as possible.”

Speaking about the update itself, Mr Sentonas put some context around the world that Crowdstrike operates in, as a cybersecurity company for big business, he said “in the cybersecurity world we’re defending against attacks that are coming very, very quickly. And we see the people behind these attacks coming up with novel techniques all the time, where they’re looking to find ways to make changes to those techniques so they can be successful in carrying out attacks. Whether they’re trying to create an opportunity to steal information or whether they’re trying to capture whatever money they can from, whether it’s a person, a business or a government.“

“So our industry has to rapidly respond, and we’re always looking to see if we can put out new techniques, new updates.“

And that’s where it all went wrong – in just one of those updates. He said “the update that we put out. Obviously, as I said, we got wrong with some logic in that update.”

But this style of update was nothing new for Crowdstrike he says “we’ve been using that technique for the better part of a decade. And in this case, we made that mistake, which we have clarified what it was. It certainly wasn’t a cyber attack.”

“ultimately, we have to get better and we let our customers down. And that that’s something that we have to address.”

The error or issue in that update – a “Logic Flaw” he says.

This was a phenomenal outage, and all caused by something so very small and simple. Which got me thinking – do we need to accept this risk day to day in such a technology driven world?

Sentonas response was all about building resilience “I think it would be easy for me to say yes, we have to. But if I kind of think about it as a technologist for the last two and a half decades, we should actually think about ways of creating more resilient applications and more resilient hardware.“

“Issues like this happen all the time, and I think, as I said, if you go back some years ago you would see more and more of these types of issues. And as an industry, we’ve gotten a lot better at trying to work at how you address it. But you see flaws, whether it’s in a car, whether it’s in software like ours, people, the manufacturers that are building these products are trying to iterate very quickly and find ways to really rapidly respond.”

The big question – Compensation. Is Crowdstrike ready for a raft of compensation claims from customers and other affected parties? In short, yes. I asked if he was prepared for that and for possible litigation, Sentonas said “absolutely. And as I said, that those conversations have to happen and will happen. That phase will come after we get our customers remediated.”

Sentonas dismissed risk that Crowdstrike might not survive this, though acknowledged that the future of the business was something that would be clear after they had helped all their customers through this current issue – When I asked him directly “how does Crowdstrike survive this as a business?” he said “Look, that conversation will be one that we talk about where people want to talk about losses, and that conversation has to happen.”

“but the focus is on the remediation piece. I’m very positive that we’ve moved into a different phase in terms of remediation. We’ve been doing a lot of testing over the weekend. The focus was to look at who needs to be remediated first what countries and time zones should we be thinking about. We spent a lot of time working with the Australian government working with organisations across Australia and New Zealand, given the time zone, to make sure that come Monday morning people were able to operate.

To those Australians and other people all around the world in fact who are not Crowdstrike customers, who’ve never heard of Crowdstrike but were caught up in all this drama, Mr Sentosa said this “I truly apologise. I mean, on behalf of the company, but personally, I apologise. “

“I understand the impact that it’s had. I’ve spoken to a lot of people that have been impacted. At the end of the day we’re gonna do everything we can to help everybody get remediated, all of our customers that have been impacted, and try to demonstrate how we can get everybody up and running and the learnings that we have there”

“I couldn’t say it enough. We got it wrong. We have to do better. We’ll learn and we’ll demonstrate what we’re gonna do moving forward to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”