CrowdStrike CEO called to testify before Congress to explain how it happened

The House Homeland Security Committee has written to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, asking him to testify before Congress. The letter says the committee wants Kurtz to explain how the global IT outage happened, and what steps it is taking to prevent any repetition.

The demand comes as companies around the world struggle to recover from the global IT outage, with Delta saying that it has cancelled 4,000 flights since Friday and expects disruption to continue for another couple of days …

Global IT outage

A mistake in an update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a global IT outage on a massive scale on Friday, with many businesses and other organizations still working to get their systems back online.

CrowdStrike’s security software is used by a huge number of companies and other organizations, and a faulty update caused Windows PCs around the world to crash and enter a reboot loop, leaving them completely unusable.

Airlines around the world had to cancel thousands of flights, and Reuters reports that Delta seems to be having the most trouble recovering.

CEO Ed Bastian on Monday said it will take the U.S. carrier another couple of days before its operations recover […] It has canceled over 4,000 flights since Friday, stranding thousands of customers across the country. By contrast, disruptions at other major U.S. carriers had largely subsided.

CrowdStrike CEO called to testify before Congress

The Washington Post reports that Congress is demanding explanations and assurances from the company.

A congressional committee on Monday called on the chief executive of the security company whose botched update triggered Friday’s sprawling computer outage to testify, according to a letter shared exclusively with The Washington Post, deepening lawmakers’ scrutiny of the incident.

We understand how one faulty update by one company was able to have such a disastrous impact, but what we don’t know is how CrowdStrike managed to issue the update globally without first testing it. That will undoubtedly be one of the questions Congress will ask, with Kurtz asked to confirm no later than tomorrow that he will agree to testify.

The committee will also be asking what steps the company is taking to ensure that this can never happen again.

Image: Homeland Security