CrowdStrike exec will testify to Congress about July’s global IT meltdown

A senior CrowdStrike executive will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee next month about the IT outage that grounded planes and workplaces to a halt globally on July 19th.

Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior vice president of counter adversary operations, has agreed to appear before the panel on September 24th at 2PM ET, the committee announced. Committee leaders had previously called on CEO George Kurtz to testify, but he’s not currently listed as a witness.

In a statement, Committee Chair Mark Green (R-TN) said that while he’d hoped Kurtz could attend, “I look forward to hearing testimony from Mr. Meyers, who CrowdStrike assured was the appropriate witness to discuss the details of the outage. 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.”

Green said in a separate statement that the flawed software update that impacted 8.5 million Windows machines “...demonstrates the urgency of promoting cyber hygiene and resiliency amid increased threats,” and that the “growing reliance on interconnected IT systems has expanded the risk surface.”

Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), who chairs the subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, said in a statement that the hearing will be “an important opportunity to learn more about what steps the company has taken in the aftermath of the outage to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Though the outage wasn’t the result of a cyberattack, Garbarino said adversaries likely watched the event and “learned how a faulty software update can trigger cascading effects on our critical infrastructure.”