A congressional committee on Monday called on the chief executive of the security company whose botched update triggered Friday’s sprawling computer outage to testify, according to a letter shared exclusively with The Washington Post, deepening scrutiny of the incident in Washington.
Republican leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee demanded that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz commit by Wednesday to appearing on the Hill to explain how the outages happened and what “mitigation steps” the company is taking to prevent future episodes.
Kurtz confirmed Friday that a faulty content update shipped for Windows users prompted the outages, which threw businesses and government organizations worldwide into disarray. The error forced airlines to ground thousands of flights and disrupted emergency services like the 911 call line. Microsoft has estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were impacted by the issue.
The global meltdown is forcing regulators and lawmakers to confront the extent to which the global economy and critical infrastructure relies on a small set of software services.