A senior executive at IT firm CrowdStrike has apologised for a faulty software update in July that left thousands of air passengers stranded around the world.
The update left global companies, including airports and airlines, unable to access their computers.
While the problem was fixed within several hours, the knock-on effect meant thousands of passengers were stranded for several days.
Amongst the worst affected were TUI customers, some of whom were delayed getting home by almost a week.
CrowdStrike Senior VP for Counter Adversary Operations Adam Meyers said it had released a content configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security software that resulted in system crashes worldwide.
“We are deeply sorry this happened and we are determined to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
“We have undertaken a full review of our systems and begun implementing plans to bolster our content update procedures so that we emerge from this experience as a stronger company.”
Giving evidence to US legislators, he added: “We appreciate the incredible round-the-clock efforts that our customers and partners who, working alongside our teams, mobilised immediately to restore systems.
“We were able to bring many customers back online within hours. I can assure that we continue to approach this with a great sense of urgency.”
CrowdStrike said an ‘undetected error’ in a software update caused the outage, but that lessons would be learned from the incident to ensure it doesn’t happen again.