CrowdStrike CEO called to testify to Congress over firm role in global tech outage

U.S. House leaders are calling on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify to Congress about the cybersecurity company’s role in sparking the widespread tech outage that grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and affected services around the world.

CrowdStrike said this week a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, are back in operation as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.

Republicans who lead the House Homeland Security committee said Monday they want those answers soon.

“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,” said a letter to Kurtz from Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York.

They added that Americans “deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking.”

CrowdStrike said late Sunday in a blog post that it was starting to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem. It also said in a brief statement yesterday that it is actively in contact with congressional committees.