The U.S. House Homeland Security committee will hold a hearing in late September to investigate the major IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update. A top executive from the cybersecurity company will testify before the subcommittee.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, will appear at the hearing on September 24th. The subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection will discuss the global impact of the faulty software update.
The update on July 19th was a pretty major disaster when it occurred over the summer, causing a massive disruption that lasted for over a week for some businesses. Millions of Windows computers were rendered useless, displaying the infamous ‘blue screen of death.’ Users had to rely on IT professionals to manually fix their systems.
The outage had a far-reaching impact on society, causing disruptions in everything from air travel and healthcare to banking and countless other industries. Major corporations are expected to incur billions of dollars in losses due to the incident.
CrowdStrike’s response and congressional inquiry
CrowdStrike has committed to implementing more rigorous testing and a phased rollout process for future updates to prevent similar problems from happening again.
“Considering the significant impact CrowdStrike’s faulty software update had on Americans and critical sectors of the economy — from aviation to medical services — we must restore confidence in the IT that underpins the services Americans depend on daily,” said Representative Mark Green, who chairs the Homeland Security committee, in a press release.
Green also stated that Americans will “undoubtedly feel the lasting, real-world consequences of this incident for some time [and] deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking to avoid the cascading impacts of outages like this across sectors.”
The chairman of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee, Representative Andrew Garbarino, emphasized the importance of the hearing. He stated, “This hearing provides a crucial opportunity to understand the steps CrowdStrike has taken to prevent a similar outage from occurring again.”
CrowdStrike’s financial performance and future outlook
The hearing will take place on September 24th from 2 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time and will be available to watch live on YouTube.
The decision to hold the hearing comes shortly after CrowdStrike announced its financial results for the second quarter. Despite the outage, the company surpassed analysts’ expectations for the period.
“Our mission is alive and well, and I know that CrowdStrike’s very best days are ahead of us,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told analysts during the quarterly conference call covering the company’s April-July period. He also apologized for the company’s role in an outage that he said “will never be lost on me, and my commitment is to make sure this never happens again. The days following the incident were among the most challenging in my career because I deeply felt what our customers experienced.”
In the wake of the Crowdstrike outage, MSPs share advice on how to prepare for the next one. Read more to understand what you can do to be better equipped to face downtime.