CrowdStrike was part of a far-right conspiracy theory involving Donald Trump

CrowdStrike is the Texas-based cybersecurity giant responsible for a massive global tech outage Friday that delayed flights, halted business operations and big firms, and in a few cases, even interrupted emergency services and some surgeries.

Before its big blunder this week, CrowdStrike was best known, to some, for its investigation into Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee leading up to the 2016 election. That investigation put CrowdStrike on the radar of far-right conspiracy theorists, who falsely believed that its investigation into the Russian hack was a ploy to discredit then-President Donald Trump’s victory. Trump fueled the flames of the theory. He referenced it in a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that eventually helped lead to his first impeachment.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike …I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said in the call. This was likely an allusion to conspiracy theorists’ belief that the CrowdStrike investigation involved Ukraine, and that the company was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. In fact, its co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Russian American.

“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” CrowdStrike told Forbes at the time. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”

CrowdStrike has also worked with the Republican Party in the past on cybersecurity issues, helping the party’s House campaign arm investigate email thefts by hackers in 2018.

Read more: What to know about the massive global tech outage grounding flights, disrupting banks and more