George Kurtz, CEO of US-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has been summoned by US House leaders to testify about the company’s involvement in a global Microsoft tech outage that disrupted operations for numerous organizations, including banks, hospital systems, and airlines.
Although the millions of affected computers are back online, customers and regulators are seeking a detailed explanation of the incident. Republicans leading the House Homeland Security Committee have requested these answers promptly.
“While we appreciate CrowdStrike’s response and coordination with stakeholders, we cannot ignore the magnitude of this incident, which some have claimed is the largest IT outage in history,” stated a letter from Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York. They emphasized that Americans “deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking.”
The outage impacted approximately 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system, significantly affecting the aviation sector, with over 1,100 flights canceled and more than 1,700 delayed across the United States.
CrowdStrike previously released a statement attributing the July 19 outage to a faulty sensor configuration update in Microsoft Windows systems. In a blog post, the company mentioned it is working on a new technique to reduce the remediation time of such problems.
Since the incident, shares of a Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped over 20%, resulting in billions of dollars in lost market value.
Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, commented on the situation in a post on X, stating, “All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers. Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”
