Top Congressional lawmakers are calling on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify about his cybersecurity company’s role in Friday’s unprecedented IT outage that grounded flights, shut down emergency services, and affected roughly 8.5 million Windows devices around the world.
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In a letter to Kurtz on Monday, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) of the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman and Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) of the cyber and infrastructure subcommittee gave the executive until Wednesday to agree to a time to appear before Congress to explain what went wrong. The lawmakers are specifically interested in learning how/why the incident happened, how similar errors can be prevented in the future, and the national security risks exposed by the outage.
“Recognizing that Americans will undoubtedly feel the lasting, real-world consequences of this incident, they deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” the lawmakers wrote.
In the wake of the outage, which has been traced back to a faulty software update that bricked Microsoft computers and led to a crash in operating systems, thousands of flights have been canceled and companies are reporting billions in possible damages.
The full letter to George Kurtz can be read below:
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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