WASHINGTON (AP) — An executive at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has apologized in testimony before Congress for causing a global technology outage last summer.
“We let our customers down,” Adam Meyers, head of CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, said Tuesday during a hearing before a U.S. House of Representatives cybersecurity subcommittee.
CrowdStrike, based in Austin, Texas, blamed a bug in an update that allowed the company’s cybersecurity systems to send malicious data to millions of customer computers, leading to a global technical outage in July that halted flights, halted TV broadcasts and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
“We are deeply sorry and we are committed to preventing this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers.
The faulty CrowdStrike software update caused approximately 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash.
Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but instead was caused by a lack of a “rapid-response content update” aimed at addressing emerging threats. The company has since strengthened its content update procedures, he said.
