CrowdStrike VP Set to Testify to Congress on IT Outage

A senior member of CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.’s operations team is scheduled to appear before Congress to answer questions on the company’s global IT outage in July that disrupted industries around the world.

In an advisory published on Friday, the House Homeland Security Committee said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations, is set to testify in a subcommittee hearing on September 24. The committee in July had invited CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. It wasn’t immediately clear why Kurtz isn’t scheduled to testify at the hearing.

Asked for comment, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said, “We continue to actively and collaboratively work with relevant Congressional committees.”

Representative Mark Green, a Republican from Tennessee and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said he looked forward to Meyers’ testimony. “Americans deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation CrowdStrike is taking to avoid the cascading impacts of outages like this across sectors,” he said.

The committee has previously invited company executives to testify over cyber incidents that have had major ripple effects through American businesses.

The July 19 CrowdStrike outage, caused by a flawed content update, paralyzed air travel, banking systems and other businesses globally.

Representative Andrew Garbarino, a New York Republican and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, said the hearing would be an opportunity to see what steps CrowdStrike has taken to prevent a similar situation from occurring. Since the incident, the company has announced wide-ranging changes to how it tests and deploys content updates.

“While the outage was not due to a threat actor, we know our adversaries and opportunistic criminals have been watching closely,” said Garbarino in the advisory. “They have learned how a faulty software update can trigger cascading effects on our critical infrastructure.”

Top photo: The Microsoft Corp. Windows Recovery screen displayed at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York, US, on Friday, July 19, 2024. Airlines around the world experienced disruption on an unprecedented scale after a widespread global computer outage grounded planes and created chaos at airports. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg.