More than two months after a faulty update from CrowdStrike Holdings triggered an IT outage — crashing millions of Windows PCs, grounding planes and halting banking and other business operations around the world — a high-level executive from the company will apologize on Capitol Hill.
“On July 19, we let our customers down,” Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior vice president of adversarial operations, said in a prepared testimony shall be referred to a House subcommittee. “We are deeply sorry that this happened and are determined to prevent it from happening again.”
The global cybersecurity company that provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices sent out a content configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security software that triggered system crashes worldwide, according to comments prepared for Meyer’s testimony before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and the Subcommittee on Infrastructure Protection.
New detection configurations had been validated on July 19, but “were not understood by the Falcon sensor’s rule engine, resulting in the affected sensors not working until the problematic configurations were replaced,” according to Meyer’s statement.
CrowdStrike has since taken several steps to improve its distribution processes to ensure such an incident does not happen again, he said.
Delta Air Lines has threatened to take CrowdStrike to court over the devastating outageand said it had to cancel 7,000 flights over five days, costing the airline $500 million. CrowdStrike has denied the allegationsand said Delta tried to blame CrowdStrike for its own response to the outage.