Republican lawmakers have called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kutz to testify in a congressional hearing about a major tech outage that affected various industries around the world last week.
The IT outages were triggered on July 19 by a defect in a content update for Windows hosts from CrowdStrike. Microsoft estimated it affected 8.5 million Windows devices globally. CrowdStrike said a fix has been deployed and that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.
Reps. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) sent a letter to Mr. Kurtz on July 22, requesting him to schedule a hearing with the House Homeland Security Committee by July 24 to address the issue.
The lawmakers stated in the letter that the outage disrupted “key functions of the global economy” within less than a day, including aviation, health care, banking, media, and emergency services.
“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 letter reads.
“Recognizing that Americans will undoubtedly feel the lasting, real-world consequences of this incident, they deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” it added.
The lawmakers emphasized that the incident should serve as a broad warning “about national security risks associated with network dependency.”
“Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states such as China and Russia are watching our response to this incident closely,” stated Republicans.
“Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again,” they added.
CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas issued a public apology after the incident and said his cybersecurity firm understood “the gravity and impact of the situation” while identifying its cause.
“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again,” he added.
While Windows estimated that less than 1 percent of all Windows machines were affected by CrowdStrike’s issue, its economic impacts were widespread due to many critical service-operating enterprises relying on their software. Linux and Mac operating systems remained unaffected.
