By The United States House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee has sent a letter to CrowdStrike Holdings Inc chief executive officer George Kurtz asking him to testify on last week’s global tech outage.
CrowdStrike’s glitchy update to its security software crashed computers powered by Microsoft’s Windows operating system on July 19, disrupting global internet services and affecting a broad swathe of industries including airlines, banking and healthcare.
Microsoft said on Saturday about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected.
Services across industries gradually came back online later on Friday, but companies were dealing with backlogs, delays, cancelled flights and other issues, raising questions on how to avoid such a situation in the future and whether such critical software should remain in the hands of a few companies.
The letter urges Kurtz to schedule a hearing with the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection by tomorrow.
Key quotes
“While we appreciate CrowdStrike’s response and coordination with stakeholders, we cannot ignore the magnitude of this incident, which some have claimed is the largest IT outage in history,” the congressional panel wrote in its letter to Kurtz yesterday. The letter was first reported by the Washington Post.
“CrowdStrike is actively in contact with relevant congressional committees. Briefings and other engagement timelines may be disclosed at members’ discretion,” a company spokesman said.
