CrowdStrike CEO Called to Testify to Congress Over Role in Tech Outage
WASHINGTON (NEWSnet/AP) — U.S. House leaders are calling on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify to Congress about the cybersecurity company’s role in sparking a widespread tech outage.
CrowdStrike said a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed July 19 are back in operation as its customers and regulators await additional explanation for what occurred.
Republicans who lead the House Homeland Security committee said Monday they want those answers soon.
“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,” states a letter to Kurtz from Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York.
A defective software update sent by CrowdStrike to its customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical services, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The painstaking work of fixing it has often required a company’s IT crew to manually delete files on affected machines.
Late Sunday, CrowdStrike said in a blog post that it is beginning to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem. It also said in a brief statement Monday it is actively in contact with congressional committees.
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