CrowdStrike short sellers net $461 mn after stock plunges on Windows outage

Short sellers piling into bets against CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. were rewarded Friday when a botched software update from the firm sparked a global IT outage and sent shares plunging to their worst day since November 2022.

The contrarian group reaped paper profits of $461 million on the cybersecurity software company’s 11% drop, according to data from S3 Partners LLC. The selloff was enough to swing CrowdStrike short sellers to gains year to date. Shares of the company fell as much as 13% Monday, adding even more to the cohorts’ mark-to-market profits.