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The breach at SolarWinds could well turn into an existential event for the company, depending on how customers react and how SolarWinds is able to weather the lawsuits that will almost certainly ensue.

“The lawsuits are coming, and I hope they have a good general counsel,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now that the government is telling people to turn off [the SolarWinds] software, the question is will anyone turn it back on?”

According to its SEC filing, total revenue from the Orion products across all customers — including those who may have had an installation of the Orion products that contained the malicious update — was approximately $343 million, or roughly 45 percent of the firm’s total revenue. SolarWinds’ stock price has fallen 25 percent since news of the breach first broke.

Some of the legal and regulatory fallout may hinge on what SolarWinds knew or should have known about the incident, when, and how it responded. For example, Vinoth Kumar, a cybersecurity “bug hunter” who has earned cash bounties and recognition from multiple companies for reporting security flaws in their products and services, posted on Twitter that he notified SolarWinds in November 2019 that the company’s software download website was protected by a simple password that was published in the clear on SolarWinds’ code repository at Github.

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Andrew Morris, founder of the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence, on said that as of Tuesday evening SolarWinds still hadn’t removed the compromised Orion software updates from its distribution server.

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Another open question is how or whether the incoming U.S. Congress and presidential administration will react to this apparently broad cybersecurity event. CSIS’s Lewis says he doubts lawmakers will be able to agree on any legislative response, but he said it’s likely the Biden administration will do something.

“It will be a good new focus for DHS, and the administration can issue an executive order that says federal agencies with regulatory authority need to manage these things better,” Lewis said. “But whoever did this couldn’t have picked a better time to cause a problem, because their timing almost guarantees a fumbled U.S. response.”