CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is being called to the House to testify about the global IT outage that has hampered enterprises--notably airlines like Delta--for days.
House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, MD (R-TN) and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) sent a letter to Kurtz requesting public testimony.
Kurtz's testimony will be closely watched, but he’s hardly the first technology CEO to testify and take lumps from lawmakers. CrowdStrike’s outage lands just as cybersecurity vendors are pushing platformization in a bid to consolidate IT budgets. While the cybersecurity industry sees innovation from startups and smaller companies, it’s still dominated by a few large vendors, including CrowdStrike. Some vendors, like Palo Alto Networks, advocate for platformization, aiming for even greater consolidation.
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Green and Garbarino wrote:
"We write in response to the global information technology (IT) outage, which has been attributed to a “defect” in a CrowdStrike software update that impacted Microsoft Windows. 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. In less than one day, we have seen major impacts to key functions of the global economy, including aviation, healthcare, banking, media, and emergency services."
The letter also requests that CrowdStrike schedule a hearing with the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection no later than 5 p.m. July 24.
Delta has struggled with restoring services, but the CrowdStrike outage affected multiple industries. For its part, CrowdStrike has documented what went wrong and published a remediation and guidance hub.
Kurtz said in a statement:
"I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for the outage. All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority."
