House Homeland Security aims for CrowdStrike hearing in September
The House Homeland Security Committee is currently eyeing September for a hearing focused on last week’s CrowdStrike outage, a committee aide told FedScoop.
Unforeseen changes in the congressional calendar were cited by the aide for the reasoning behind the timing of the hearing. In a Monday letter, the committee had called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify, giving him until Wednesday to schedule a hearing regarding the incident, which grounded flights and disrupted businesses around the world, in addition to impacting federal government agencies and city and state services.
On Thursday, NetChoice, a trade group that represents major internet companies, sent a letter calling for a similar hearing in the Senate. Recipients of the letter included Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., the chair and ranking member, respectively, on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and James Lankford, R-Okla., the top lawmakers on the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management.
“The widespread nature of the outage and its profound impact underscores the urgent need to address the implications of single points of failure in America’s critical IT infrastructure. While Crowdstrike’s role will be explored in an upcoming hearing in the U.S. House, many questions remain about Microsoft,” said the letter, which was signed by Amy Bos, the group’s director of state and federal affairs.
She continued: “The outage made clear that Microsoft software sits at the foundation of many critical industries. According to one estimate, this outage cost businesses $5.4 billion — yet only affected 1% of Microsoft’s systems globally.”
