Passengers wait at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, after airlines grounded flights due to a worldwide tech outage caused by an update to CrowdStrike's "Falcon Sensor" software which crashed Microsoft Windows systems, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 19, 2024. REUTERS/Jennah Moon/File Photo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior executive at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike will apologize at an appearance before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday for the company's faulty software update that caused a global IT outage in July.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president for counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, will tell the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee that CrowdStrike released a content configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security software that resulted in system crashes worldwide.
"We are deeply sorry this happened and are determined to prevent it from happening again," Meyers' testimony says. "We have undertaken a full review of our systems and begun implementing plans to bolster our content update procedures so that we emerge from this experience as a stronger company."
The July 19 incident led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries around the globe including banks, health care, media companies and hotels chains. The outage disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
Meyers said on July 19 new threat detection configurations were validated and sent to sensors running on Microsoft Windows devices but the "configurations were not understood by the Falcon sensor’s rules engine, leading affected sensors to malfunction until the problematic configurations were replaced."
Delta Air Lines has vowed to take legal action after it said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days, and cost it $500 million. CrowdStrike rejected Delta's contention it should be blamed for massive flight disruptions.
The committee in July asked CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify on the outage.
Last month, CrowdStrike cut its revenue and profit forecasts in the aftermath of the faulty software update, and said the environment would remain challenging for about a year.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Mark Potter)
