Global IT Outage: Interview with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz 7/19/24

Carl Quintanilla (0:00)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

It is being called the largest IT outage in history, as this operating defect at CrowdStrike does hobble airlines, banks, mass transit, and municipal services all around the world. Good Friday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber, Sara Eisen here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Coming up this morning, we are gonna talk to CrowdStrike's George Kurtz in just a few moments with our own Jim Cramer about the outage and the timeline for fixing it. First, though, we get to Megan Casella this morning with some breaking news. Megan.

Megan Casella (0:40)

Hey, Carl, good morning. The Biden campaign is now holding firm this morning and saying that President Biden is remaining in the race for his reelection. A long new campaign memo out this morning outlines that despite widespread concerns, the party has, quote, no plan for an alternative nominee.

The campaign's battleground states director acknowledges the uphill battle ahead, saying they have their work cut out for them. But he shares some internal research finding that the voters that the campaign cares about the most are still planning to vote for Biden in November. I want to read you a full quote here from the memo. It says, quote, Joe Biden has made it more than clear. He's in this race and he's in it to win it. Moreover, he's the presumptive nominee. There is no plan for an alternative nominee. And in a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee.

Now, this sort of internal research and reassurance about a viable path to victory, this is what Democrats have been craving from the campaign. But it's definitely not clear at this point whether this will be enough to fully put to bed all of those calls from Democrats for President Biden to step aside. Just in the last hour, a 25th member of Congress, those representatives, Sean Cassin of Illinois, came out asking Biden to bow out. And as of last night, Democrats were saying there was just no path to Biden staying in the race, that we were at the end of the rope here. There was fresh excitement even among donors and strategists about starting to plot out a new path forward.

Obviously, this memo now will quiet some of those calls and plans, but the question becomes by just how much and whether President Biden can continue to stay on. So we'll stay on this and see if he can make it through the next few hours, the next few days. Back to you guys.

Carl Quintanilla (2:12)

Megan, yesterday it was Adam Schiff and Senator Tester going public with their efforts to try to get the president to bow out of the race. And there is some reporting this morning that suggests more Democrats may go public next week if the president weren't the change of mind.

Megan Casella (2:29)

Absolutely. This is becoming almost a fistfight here. What we're hearing is as lawmakers come back into Washington next week, that more and more of them might start to come out publicly. They'll be speaking together again. We can assume there will be more caucus meetings and that sort of thing. But it's almost as if the Biden campaign is sort of daring them to come out publicly. Many, many Democrats here, out of respect for the president, really wanted a lot of this to stay behind the scenes. They wanted him to get to this decision on his own to step aside. They thought that would be the best path forward for him, for his legacy and for the party. They're not getting that, so now it just continues after three weeks. We're continuing to have to watch to see if this will get even louder and if it will ultimately get sort of pushed out of this nomination.

David Faber (3:12)

Well, the turmoil itself is certainly not helping the reelection efforts one would imagine, broadly speaking, for the party.

Megan, you know, there were reports about former Speaker Nancy Pelosi having a conversation with the president and his key adviser, Mike Donilon, sharing her own insights from polling that she was seeing, saying there was virtually no path and that down ballot would be a bloodbath as well. Those are my words, not hers. But, you know, what are they seeing? Do you have any sense in terms of what Biden's inner circle sees versus what, for example, the former speaker sees?

Megan Casella (3:50)

The biggest question here has been exactly what polls the Biden inner circle is looking at. This memo starts to sort of hint that they're seeing something that supports it. We'll also hear from campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon this morning. And, you know, a lot of Democrats are hoping that she'll have some of those numbers to share. But the concern has been that they're sort of burying their head in the sand, that they're not looking at the polls that everyone else is looking at. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has, for her whole career, been very savvy, very good at this, always understanding and impact the political impact of different events on her caucus. So for her to be warning like this, she's really saying, she's telegraphing, that she's seeing something that she's worried the campaign, and especially Biden himself, is not seeing. They're trying to argue that this isn't just about you and this White House anymore. This is about the entire party and all of the policy that they've been working for.