CrowdStrike CEO apologizes to Congress for July global tech outage

WASHINGTON — The CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike apologized in testimony before Congress for causing a global technology outage over the summer.

“We failed our customers,” Adam Meyers, head of threat intelligence at CrowdStrike, said during a hearing before a U.S. House of Representatives cybersecurity subcommittee on Tuesday.

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to send incorrect data to millions of customer computers. In July, it caused a global technical outage that grounded flights, interrupted television broadcasts and disrupted banks, hospitals and retail stores.

“Everywhere Americans turned, basic social functions were unavailable,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.”

The Tennessee Republican compared the fallout to an attack “that we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated state actor.”

“We are deeply saddened and committed to preventing similar incidents in the future,” Meyers told lawmakers, discussing the technical errors that led to the crash of some 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Meyers said he wanted to “emphasize that this was not a cyberattack” but was caused by a flawed “rapid content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since strengthened its content update procedures, he said.

The company still faces numerous lawsuits from individuals and businesses affected by the massive power outage in July.