House Republicans have called for CrowdStrike CEO George Kutz to testify before Congress about a tech outage that affected numerous industries globally.
IT outages were reported on July 19, affecting emergency services, airlines, banking systems, and other sectors.
Reps. Mark Green (R-TN) and Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) sent a letter to Kutz, calling for him to schedule a hearing with the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection by July 24.
“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,” the representatives wrote.
The Republicans explained that the IT outage led to the cancellation of more than 3,000 commercial flights, more than 11,800 flight delays, and a “global ground stop” from the Federal Aviation Administration. Surgeries, emergency call centers, and other health disruptions were reported from the outage.
“Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states, such as China and Russia, are watching our response to this incident closely,” the letter added, “In fact, as CrowdStrike relayed in a recent blog post, malicious actors presumably targeting your Latin American customers have already seized the moment and sought to exploit the vulnerability. Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again.”
The July 19 outage was linked to a CrowdStrike software update.
Kurtz said at the time, “Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.”
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.”
He explained there was an “issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts.”
