CrowdStrike VP Prepares to Testify Before Congress About IT Outage

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

In an advisory released Friday, the House Homeland Security Committee said Adam Meyers, senior vice president for adversary operations, is scheduled to testify at a subcommittee hearing on Sept. 24. In July, the committee invited CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. It was not immediately clear why Kurtz is not scheduled to testify at the hearing.

Related: Microsoft, cyber firms to meet on fixes after CrowdStrike crash

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

Representative Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican 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 effects of disruptions like this across sectors,” he said.

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The committee has previously invited company executives to testify about cyber incidents that have had major effects on American business.

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

Representative Andrew Garbarino, a Republican from New York and 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. Since the incident, the company has announced sweeping changes to how it tests and deploys content updates.

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

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

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