Newspulse

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been summoned by U.S. House leaders to testify about the cybersecurity firm’s role in a major tech outage that caused global disruptions. The outage, which occurred last Friday, grounded flights, disrupted banks and hospital systems, and affected services worldwide.

CrowdStrike reported that a “significant number” of the millions of affected computers are now back in operation. However, a detailed explanation of the incident is still awaited by customers and regulators.

Republicans leading the House Homeland Security Committee, including Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York, emphasized the need for answers. They noted the incident’s severity, describing it as possibly the largest IT outage in history, and stressed that Americans deserve to know how it happened and what steps CrowdStrike is taking to mitigate it.

The outage was caused by a defective software update from CrowdStrike, impacting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Fixing the issue has often required IT crews to manually delete files on affected machines.

CrowdStrike announced late Sunday that it is implementing a new technique to accelerate problem remediation. Since the incident, shares of the Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped by more than 20%, resulting in a significant loss in market value.

The scope of the disruptions has also drawn the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcers. Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, highlighted the fragility of concentrated systems in a social media post, noting that such glitches often result in widespread outages affecting multiple industries.