US Congress calls CrowdStrike CEO to testify over his firm’s role in global Microsoft outage impacting millions

US-based cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz has been called by US House leaders to testify to Congress about the company's role in causing the global Microsoft tech outage that disrupted operations for numerous organizations, banks, hospital systems and airlines across.

Although the millions of computers that crashed are back in operation, the customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.

Republicans who lead the House Homeland Security Committee said they soon want those answers.

"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,” a letter read which was sent to Kurtz from Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York.

They stressed that Americans "deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking.”

The outage affected about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system. It most notably disrupted the aviation sector, where over 1,100 flights were canceled, and more than 1,700 were delayed across the United States.

Earlier, CrowdStrike released a statement in which it said the July 19 outage was caused by a faulty sensor configuration update in Microsoft Windows systems.

CrowdStrike, in a blog post, said it was working on implementing a new technique to reduce the remediation time of the problem.

The shares of a Texas-based cybersecurity company have seen over 20% drop since the incident, resulting in losing billions of dollars in market value.

“All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers,” said Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, in a post on X.

“Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems," she added.