An Outage Strikes: Assessing the Global Impact of CrowdStrike’s Faulty Software Update
CrowdStrike will return to the spotlight on Tuesday when a senior executive testifies before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee regarding the company’s catastrophic software update in July that led to a global IT outage.
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Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, will go before lawmakers to explain what caused the disruption and also outline the measures that the company is taking to ensure that nothing like it happens again. His testimony could even effect future cyber legislation.
Faulty software rolled out to Windows machines by the Texas-based firm knocked out IT systems around the world, causing widespread disruption for airlines, airports, banks, health care providers, retailers, and other businesses big and small.
The damage was so severe that the incident is now regarded as the worst blunder ever to have hit the IT sector. CrowdStrike also won the Most Epic Fail prize at the recent Pwnie Awards, which company president Michael Sentonas showed up for and accepted in person.
Shortly after the outage hit two months ago, CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz issued a public apology, saying that his team had “quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix.”
He said it was not a cyberattack and that the outage was instead caused by a “defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts,” adding that Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted.
Kurtz promised he was committed to providing “full transparency on how this occurred” and would work “to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
It’s hoped that Meyers’ appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday will shed new light on the incident, with the executive expected to face tough questioning during his time in the hot seat.
How to watch
The hearing starts at 2 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 24, and could run until 5 p.m. ET. You can watch it via the video player embedded at the top of this page.
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