Musk's controversial claim: DEI hiring responsible for IT outage

While much of the world was reeling from the global IT outage over Thursday and Friday, X CEO Elon Musk did not miss a chance to use the opportunity to take yet another potshot at DEI hiring. 

American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, was responsible for one of the biggest IT outages in history on Friday, affecting 8.5 million Windows devices, when an update to one of its applications, Falcon, went live with a coding error built in. 

CrowdStrike has raised millions in funding from Silicon Valley, employs thousands from around the globe, and reportedly services 538 out of the Fortune 1000 companies. 

Plus they're also big on DEI hiring. 

CrowdStrike is a Gold Partner of Bright Network's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging panel. 

Bright Network, a media tech platform, connects graduates from various backgrounds with suitable employers. And as part of this partnership, CrowdStrike says they're committed to creating an equitable and inclusive workplace. 

On Friday, following news about the outage, Elon Musk replied to a 2-year-old tweet by CrowdStrike about their association with Bright Network. 

In it, he simply said: "Not very 'bright' right now, is it?"

The replies to his tweet, too, were largely in support of his skewed stance on the matter. 

DEI initiatives at various US-based companies have recently seen a pushback from upper management, with Tesla reportedly dropping language referencing diversity from its annual shareholder report earlier this year. 

Microsoft, too, recently laid off a team that was devoted to diversity, equity & inclusion. Shortly after that, tractor company John Deere announced they would do away with nearly all their DEI policies in favour of a quality-based workplace. 

Other companies who have recently either completely eliminated or reduced the size of their DEI teams include Zoom, Snap, Google, and Meta.