US congressional panel calls on CrowdStrike CEO to testify on outage

By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has sent a letter to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz asking him to testify on last week's global tech outage.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

CrowdStrike's glitchy update to its security software crashed computers powered by Microsoft's Windows operating system on Friday, disrupting internet services across the globe and affecting a broad swath of industries including airlines, banking and healthcare. Microsoft said on Saturday about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected.

Services across industries gradually came back online later on Friday but companies were dealing with backlogs, delays, canceled flights and other issues, raising questions on how to avoid such a situation in the future and whether such critical software should remain in the hands of a few companies.

KEY QUOTES

"While we appreciate CrowdStrike's response and coordination with stakeholders, we cannot ignore the magnitude of this incident, which some have claimed is the largest IT outage in history," the congressional panel wrote in its letter to Kurtz dated Monday. The letter was reported first by the Washington Post.

The company had no immediate comment on the letter.

WHAT'S NEXT

The letter urges the CEO to schedule a hearing with a subcommittee of the panel - the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection - by Wednesday.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Franklin Paul and Matthew Lewis)