CrowdStrike’s senior executive, Adam Meyers, apologised before a US House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday for the company’s defective software upgrade, which caused a global IT outage in July.
More than two months after CrowdStrike Holdings’ defective upgrade caused an IT outage that crashed millions of Windows computers, grounded planes, and halted bank and other business activities throughout the world, the company’s top executive apologised on Capitol Hill.
Meyers informed the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee that CrowdStrike published a content configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security software, which caused system breakdowns worldwide.
“We are deeply sorry this happened and we are determined to prevent this from happening again,” Meyers said. “We have undertaken a full review of our systems and begun implementing plans to bolster our content update procedures so that we emerge from this experience as a stronger company.”
The gathering of legislators also revealed some of their flaws.
Congressman Carlos Gimenez expressed concern about AI’s potential to write dangerous programming.
CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers stated that the technology was “not there yet” but that it “gets better” every day.
Congressman Gonzales expressed concern that Congress itself did not understand the larger issue and questioned how the US government could improve its response in a similar situation.
Adam Meyers stated that during the CrowdStrike outage, it was the firm’s responsibility to notify the government; during a cyber incident, it would be to assist the government.
“This is a team sport and we are all on the same team” according to him.
CrowdStrike has subsequently made several efforts to strengthen its deployment methods, ensuring that such an incident does not occur again, he stated.
We earlier reported that CrowdStrike offered a gift card to its partners as an apology for adding more work to their already heavy workload during last week’s major worldwide digital outage that brought down whole industries.
