
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz was summoned to the US Congress to testify about the global technology outage that occurred last Friday. The outage affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices worldwide.
The U.S. House Homeland Security Committee sent a formal letter to Kurtz asking him to testify publicly about the incident. The crash was reportedly caused by the release of an untested security software update that was sent to CrowdStrike customers. Among the sectors affected are air transport, banking, media, health care and emergency services. The crash caused a blue screen of death (BSOD) to appear on computers.
The committee noted that the scale of the incident is unprecedented, and the American people have the right to know how the events unfolded and what steps were taken to mitigate the consequences. Lawmakers have raised national security concerns over reliance on a single cybersecurity company and warned of an increase in phishing attacks, fake websites and other fraudulent schemes during the recovery period.
Last Friday’s outage caused system crashes on millions of devices around the world. Among the most affected companies was Delta Air Lines. IT specialists warn about possible new cyber threats that can take advantage of the situation for attacks.
Lawmakers believe that lessons should be learned from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again. Representatives of CrowdStrike reported that the company is actively cooperating with the relevant committees of Congress.