CrowdStrike Prepares for US Congressional Questions on Global IT Outage

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm blamed for a global computer outage in July that grounded flights and delayed medical treatment, will answer questions in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday.

The incident, caused by a faulty software update introduced by the American company, paralyzed approximately eight and a half million computers running Microsoft software, which paralyzed the activities of companies and infrastructure.

Now, the company will have to answer questions from lawmakers for the first time, and Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike, will have to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee to assess the global impact of the outage.

Committee members previously called CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify, but he is not currently listed as a witness at the hearing.

In the UK, the CrowdStrike outage left GPs unable to access the digital system to manage appointments or view patient records, as well as sending prescriptions to pharmacies, which were also badly hit, forcing doctors to revert to using pen and paper.

Meanwhile, flights were being cancelled or delayed and passengers were left without internet access as airline systems were taken offline and staff were forced to manually issue boarding passes and baggage tags.

Many small businesses have also seen a significant drop in revenue, with some saying the closure of their websites as a result of the incident has cost them hundreds or even thousands of pounds in lost sales.

The outage has sparked debate about the broader internet infrastructure and whether so many internet services can be based on the services of a single company. The incident has drawn the attention of regulators, who are seeking more details about what went wrong.

In its analysis of the outage, CrowdStrike said the issue was caused by an “undetected bug” in a software update, and that a bug in the company’s content verification system meant that “problematic content data” was not detected and not allowed to be shared with Microsoft Windows customers, causing the outage.