The July 19 incident led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries around the globe. Credit: Shutterstock/Volodymyr

A senior executive at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike will testify before a US House of Representatives subcommittee, on 24 September, about the company’s faulty software update which caused the biggest IT outage in history. 

On 19 July this year, the faulty update by CrowdStrike caused issues with Microsoft Windows computers running the software which resulted in 8.5 million systems crashing and unable to restart. 

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The incident is said to be the largest outage in the history of IT and will be the basis for the testimony by Adam Meyers, senior vice president for counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. 

Meyers will testify before the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee. 

Last week, CrowdStrike cut its revenue and profit forecasts in the aftermath of the faulty software update, and said the business environment would remain challenging for about a year. 

The cybersecurity company also disclosed that it has received enquiries from governmental authorities about the incident which affected industries covering air travel, banking, hospitality, retail, hospitals, stock markets, manufacturing, broadcast media, and government and emergency services. 

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“Considering the significant impact CrowdStrike’s faulty software update had on Americans and critical sectors of the economy from aviation to medical services we must restore confidence in the IT that underpins the services Americans depend on daily,” said Representative Mark Green, who chairs the Homeland Security committee.  

The committee had sent a letter in July to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz asking him to testify on the global technology outage. 

Delta Air Lines has since vowed to take legal action after it said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days at a cost of $500m. 

CrowdStrike believes it should not be blamed for the flight disruptions and is yet to comment on the need to testify in September.