CrowdStrike executive apologizes to Congress for July global tech outage

WASHINGTON — 

An enforcement astatine cybersecurity institution CrowdStrike apologized successful grounds to Congress for sparking a planetary exertion outage implicit the summer.

"We fto our customers down," said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike's menace quality division, successful a proceeding earlier a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday.

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug successful an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to propulsion atrocious information retired to millions of lawsuit computers, mounting disconnected a planetary tech outage successful July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts disconnected aerial and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.

"Everywhere Americans turned, basal societal functions were unavailable," House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. "We cannot let a mistake of this magnitude to hap again."

The Tennessee Republican likened the interaction of the outage to an onslaught "we would expect to beryllium cautiously executed by a malicious and blase nation-state actor."

"We're profoundly atrocious and we are determined to forestall this from ever happening again," Meyers told lawmakers portion laying retired the method missteps that led to the outage of astir 8.5 cardinal computers moving Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Meyers said helium wanted to "underscore that this was not a cyberattack" but was, instead, caused by a faulty "rapid-response contented update" focused connected addressing caller threats. The institution has since bolstered its contented update procedures, helium said.

The institution inactive faces a fig of lawsuits from radical and businesses that were caught up successful July's wide outage.