On Tuesday, an executive from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. CRWD faced questioning from House lawmakers regarding a global technology outage that occurred in July.
What Happened: Adam Meyers, senior vice president of CrowdStrike, expressed his company’s regret for the incident that disrupted thousands of flights and various industries.
“We are deeply sorry this happened and are determined to prevent it from happening again,” Meyers stated during his opening remarks, reported The Hill.
The hearing, held by the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure, was the first to address the July 19 update mishap by CrowdStrike.
The faulty update crashed computers running Microsoft Corporation’s MSFT Windows software, leading to a global outage.
During the questioning, Meyers stated that the outage was not a result of a cyberattack but was caused by a rapid response content update from CrowdStrike.
“I can assure you that we will take the lessons learned from this incident and use them to inform our work as we improve for the future,” he said.
Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) raised the pressing issue of artificial intelligence, questioning the executive responsible for approving the update and whether AI was involved in the decision, the report noted.
In response, Meyers said that AI had no role in the decision-making process, explaining that the update was one of 10 to 12 released daily by the company.
He added that the firm has stopped deploying updates to all customers simultaneously to prevent a recurrence of the issue.
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Why It Matters: The global IT outage, attributed to a software update from CrowdStrike, was described as the "largest IT outage in history,” impacting computer systems running on the Windows operating system and cloud services.
The incident affected businesses worldwide, including airlines, banks, media, and even 911 services.
Following the outage, Delta Air Lines, Inc. disclosed that it expects the operational disruptions to have a direct revenue impact of $380 million for the September quarter due to flight cancellations and customer compensation.
Microsoft pointed the finger at Delta for its extended recovery from the outage, stating that the airline's lack of IT modernization contributed to the prolonged recovery.
Delta defended its IT infrastructure, stating it has invested billions in IT capital expenditures since 2016.
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