WASHINGTON (AP) 鈥� An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer.
鈥淲e let our customers down,鈥� said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike's threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday.
Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
鈥淓verywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,鈥� House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. 鈥淲e cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.鈥�
The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack 鈥渨e would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor鈥�.
鈥淲e鈥檙e deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,鈥� Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Meyers said he wanted to 鈥渦nderscore that this was not a cyberattack鈥� but was, instead, caused by a faulty 鈥渞apid-response content update鈥� focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said.
The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July鈥檚 mass outage.
The Associated Press
