CrowdStrike chief to testify before Congress

An executive at CrowdStrike will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee later this month about the information technology outage that grounded planes and jobs around the world on July 19.

Adam Meyers, the division's senior vice president for counterterrorism, has agreed to appear before the Homeland Security Committee on September 24. Chief executive George Kurtz had previously been called to testify by committee leaders, but he is not currently on the witness list.

Board Chairman Mark Green said in a statement that he had hoped Kurtz would be able to attend, “but I look forward to the testimony of Mr. Meyers, who CrowdStrike has assured is a suitable witness to discuss the details of the outage. The American people deserve to know in detail how this incident occurred and what measures CrowdStrike is taking to avoid the consequences of such outages in various sectors.”

In a separate statement, Green said the flawed software update, which affected 8.5 million Windows PCs, "highlights the urgency to promote cyber hygiene and resilience in a time of growing threats."

Andrew Garbarino, who chairs the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee, said in a statement that the hearing will be "an important opportunity to learn more about the steps the company has taken since the outage to prevent this from happening again." Although the outage was not the result of a cyber attack, Garbarino said malicious actors certainly learned a lot from the incident and started thinking "how a botched software update can trigger domino effects on our critical infrastructure."