House Republicans Demand Hearing With CrowdStrike CEO to Address Tech Outage

Republican lawmakers have called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kutz to testify in a congressional hearing about a major tech outage that affected various industries around the world last week.

The IT outages were triggered on July 19 by a defect in a content update for Windows hosts from CrowdStrike. Microsoft estimated it affected 8.5 million Windows devices globally. CrowdStrike said a fix has been deployed and that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.

The lawmakers stated in the letter that the outage disrupted “key functions of the global economy” within less than a day, including aviation, health care, banking, media, and emergency services.

“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,” the letter reads.

“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,” it added.

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The lawmakers emphasized that the incident should serve as a broad warning “about the national security risks associated with network dependency.”

“Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states, such as China and Russia, are watching our response to this incident closely,” the Republicans stated.

“Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again,” they added.

CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas issued a public apology after the incident and said the cybersecurity firm understood “the gravity and impact of the situation” and has identified the issue.

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Mr. Sentonas said in a July 19 statement.

“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again,” he added.

While Windows estimated that the CrowdStrike incident affected less than 1 percent of all Windows machines, the economic and societal impacts were widespread because many enterprises that operate critical services use CrowdStrike. Linux and Mac operating systems were not affected.

The Epoch Times has reached out to CrowdStrike for comment but did not hear back by publication time.

Victoria Friedman contributed to this report.