CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (CRWD) shares climbed on Friday following news that a senior executive from the company will testify before Congress about the global IT outage that disrupted businesses worldwide in July.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike, will appear before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection on September 24. The committee will be questioning Meyers about the outage, which affected air travel, banking systems, and other critical infrastructure.
The committee had originally invited CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in July, but it is unclear why he will not be testifying at the hearing.
The hearing will focus on the steps CrowdStrike has taken to prevent a recurrence of the outage. The company has implemented significant changes to its processes for testing and deploying content updates since the incident.
Representative Andrew Garbarino, a New York Republican and chairman of the subcommittee, stated that the hearing will examine the measures CrowdStrike has implemented to prevent a similar incident from occurring.
“While the outage was not due to a threat actor, we know our adversaries and opportunistic criminals have been watching closely,” said Garbarino. “They have learned how a faulty software update can trigger cascading effects on our critical infrastructure.”
The CrowdStrike outage, which affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows computers globally, was caused by an error with test software. The company has acknowledged the error and has implemented new procedures to prevent future incidents.
CRWD shares were trading higher by 1.85% at $276.70 at the time of writing.
