WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. House leaders are calling on CrowdStrike Inc Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz to testify before Congress about the cybersecurity company’s role in triggering a widespread technology outage that grounded airline flights, took bank and hospital systems offline and affected services around the world.
CrowdStrike said this week that a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruption, are working again as customers and regulators wait for more details about what happened.
Republicans who lead the House Homeland Security Committee said Monday they want answers quickly.
“While we appreciate CrowdStrike’s response and collaboration with stakeholders, we cannot ignore the seriousness of this incident, which some have argued is the largest IT outage in history,” Reps. Mark E. Green (R-Tenn.) and Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.) said in a letter to Kurtz.
They added that Americans “have a right to know the details of how this incident happened and what mitigation measures CrowdStrike is taking.”
A faulty software update sent by CrowdStrike to customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other essential services on Friday, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Repairs were painstaking, often requiring corporate IT staff to manually delete files on affected machines.
CrowdStrike said in a blog post late Sunday that it has begun deploying new technology to speed up repairs to the issues.
The Texas-based cybersecurity company’s shares have fallen more than 20% since the financial crisis, wiping billions of dollars from its market capitalization.
The scale of the disruption has also attracted the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcement agencies, but it remains to be seen whether any action will be taken against the company.
“Too often recently, a single glitch has led to an entire system outage, impacting industries like healthcare, airlines, banks and car dealerships,” Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said in a Sunday post on social media platform X. “Millions of people and businesses will pay the price. These events show how concentration creates fragile systems.”
