Shares of cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike plunged more than 10% Friday after a faulty software update caused a stunning mass shutdown of businesses around the world.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz scrambled to apologize for the crisis, which affected millions of customers using Microsoft Windows — crippling airlines, banks, hospitals and various other clients.

“This is clearly a major black eye for CrowdStrike and the stock will be under pressure after this global outage related to Microsoft has caused massive disruption globally,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives said in a note Friday.

Tesla, SpaceX and X boss Elon Musk said his various companies have “deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems, so no rollouts at all” in a post on his social media platform.

Tesla was forced to halt some production lines in Texas and Nevada due to the global IT outage, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

“This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain,” Musk said in a reply to a post by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the outage.

The upgrade fiasco marked a significant setback for CrowdStrike, which had seen shares rise nearly 100% over the last 12 months as companies place more emphasis on cybersecurity and hack prevention.

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” added cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt.

Windows users experienced computer crashes and the dreaded “blue screen of death” that left them unable to restart. The issue was traced to Falcon, a CrowdStrike service that scans company devices for hacking attempts and other cybersecurity threats.

Kurtz told NBC’s “Today” show that he was “deeply sorry” for the global chaos caused by the glitch. In an X post, he said the incident was not caused by a cyberattack or security breach.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz wrote. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.”

The company issued a fix but it could take weeks for some users to get back online, one expert said.

“The fix CrowdStrike has given is quite manual and may be difficult, in some cases, to deploy at large scale,” Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Defused, told the Wall Street Journal.

The Austin, Texas-based company is among the most popular cybersecurity providers in the world, with close to 30,000 subscribers globally.

But the outage could force customers and investors alike to rethink their dependence on the company, opening the door to potential rivals like Palo Alto Networks, which saw its stock rise 2.2% on Friday, and Sentinel One, which jumped nearly 8%.

CrowdStrike closed at $304.96, down 11% on Friday.

“This event is a reminder of how complex and intertwined our global computing systems are and how vulnerable they are to a mistake and an error,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson.

“While most companies don’t really have an alternative to Microsoft, they do have alternatives for security,” he added.

“This may cause many companies to reconsider which security product they use, and whether they need to diversify across different security products in order to prevent these types of outages.”

Microsoft’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, said on X that the company was supporting customers as they recover their systems.

Its stock ticked down less than 1%.

CrowdStrike, which has previously reached a market cap of about $83 billion, posted revenue of $2.24 billion in fiscal 2023, a 54% increase compared to the previous year.

“Today CrowdStrike becomes a household name but not in a good way and this will take time to settle down but does not change our positive long-term view of CrowdStrike or cyber security sector,” Ives said in his note to clients.

The software glitch added more pressure on tech stocks. Earlier this week, shares of chipmakers such as Nvidia plunged on warnings of new trade restrictions imposed by the Biden administration and Donald Trump’s assertion that Taiwan should pay the US for defense against China.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq slid 144 points, or 0.8%, continuing a three-day slide of nearly 10% after hitting a record high of 18,647 last week.

Still, long-term trends like expected Federal Reserve interest rate cuts and the rise of artificial intelligence as reasons for optimism, according to Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.

“The tech sector is currently on sale,” Smith said in a note.

“While there are sizable declines in the stocks of the individual companies that are closest to this tech outage, we expect the broader markets to look past Friday’s outage,” he added.