There is no evidence linking the outage to the Republican National Convention. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said a glitch in an update — not a cyberattack — caused the global chaos, grounding thousands of flights, disrupting 911 calls and delaying hospital procedures.

But the global misery unexpectedly revived a conspiracy theory involving Russia, Ukraine and the Democratic National Committee that took up much of Trump’s presidency and played a prominent role in his first deposit investigation.

CrowdStrike seemed an unlikely candidate for political controversy at the time. Founded in 2011 by two former McAfee executives, The company sells cybersecurity software to Fortune 500 companies and federal and state agencies. Its first product, Falcon, an update for which was cited before Friday’s outage, detects security breaches on Windows or Mac computers. The company also advises clients on how to improve their cybersecurity.

After an IPO in 2019, CrowdStrike entered the S&P 500 last month, a milestone the company said it reached faster than any other cybersecurity company.

While CrowdStrike touted its business services, it made a name for itself investigating high-profile hacks. In 2015, CrowdStrike linked a cyberattack on Sony Pictures to North Korea. That same year, it said it evidence that hackers with ties to the Chinese government may have attempted to violate a US-China agreement to prevent economic espionage against each other.

CrowdStrike got caught up in politics in 2016, when It was hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the hacking of DNC computers a year earlier. The firm concluded that it had “high confidence” that a unit linked to Russian military intelligence was responsible for the attack.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the election, a view that alarmed some of his aides, who worried that he was being influenced by Russia. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that a former senior White House official recalled Trump saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because “Putin told me so.”

In a July 2019 phone call that became a key part of the evidence in Trump’s first impeachment trial, the then-president said urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate both former Vice President Joe Biden and CrowdStrike. “I want you to do us a favor,” he said. “… I want you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike…”

The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry report into Trump and Ukraine indicated that multiple Trump aides had tried to dissuade him from the idea. Trump’s former Russia expert Fiona Hill told the committee that former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster had repeatedly told Trump that the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory had been “completely ‘debunked’ and that allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election are false.”

In response to the conspiracy theories, CrowdStrike published an extensive Q&A in 2020 about the investigation into the DNC hack. It said it had “evidence” that Russia hacked the DNC and that the analysis was corroborated by other security firms such as Fidelis and FireEye, as well as the US intelligence community.

Social media posts on Friday showed that the CrowdStrike controversy was still very much alive among a section of the public.

“Today is not the first time CrowdStrike has caused enormous misery for the country, and even the world,” wrote YouTube commentator Hans Mahncke in a post on X that received thousands of likes. He said CrowdStrike’s reporting on the DNC hack had led to a “witch hunt” and “the criminalization of diplomacy with Russia.”

Max Blumenthal, editor of the independent website Grayzone, which has been criticized for misleading reporting, called CrowdStrike on X “the shady company hired by the DNC to hold Russia accountable for hacking its server,” and former CBS correspondent Lara Logan said CrowdStrike “has been lying for years.”

On X, Facebook and other social media platforms, hundreds of other users issued fresh criticism of CrowdStrike’s 2016 report on the DNC, with some calling it a “hoax” and others speculating whether the company could help “steal” the upcoming election. “CrowdStrike and DNC crime are intertwined,” wrote one. “The rot runs deeper than y’all know,” noted another. “It’s all connected,” wrote a third user.

More general misinformation about the outage has been circulating on social media, including an image purporting to show Microsoft’s error message in the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes.com published a fact-check on the image on Friday, calling it fake.