The United States House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has written to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, requesting that he speak on last week’s global IT outage.
The outage was caused by a defective upgrade to CrowdStrike’s security software, affecting millions of Windows devices.
The incident caused extensive disruptions in several areas, including aviation, finance, and healthcare.
Although services were gradually restored, the incident prompted worries about the concentration of vital software in the hands of a small number of organisations, as well as the possibility of future attacks.
“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 dated Monday. The letter was reported first by the Washington Post.
The letter highlights that CrowdStrike’s recovery from the technological disaster is far from complete. Even on Monday, three days after the original collapse, Delta was experiencing flight cancellations and Blue Screens of Death.
“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,” Homeland Security Chair Mark Green (R-TN) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) wrote in the letter.
In a Friday social media post, Kurtz assured the public that the major outage was “not a security or cyber incident.” Instead, he referred to “an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts,” which is the company’s security software.
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