Global tech outage impacts Austin EMS services overnight
AUSTIN, Texas - An Austin-based cybersecurity firm apparently caused a global IT outage which impacted emergency services overnight in Austin.
"CrowdStrike is a, let's call it, a very core fundamental tool that protects systems for cybersecurity," Direct Marketing Solutions Chief Information Security Officer and cybersecurity expert David Malicoat said.
On Thursday evening, systems started having major issues.
"CrowdStrike rolled out an update and there was one file in that update that had an issue. Typically, with these updates, those systems will reboot, and they'll come back online. In this case, what was happening is this issue was keeping that reboot from happening," Malicoat said.
Malicoat said computers were stuck on the blue screen of death.
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The City of Austin’s internal systems were impacted. Emergency services went manual for dispatch calls. Instead of having a computer program helping decide which units or stations to send out, dispatchers were making those calls using radios.
The 311 call center was unavailable for about three hours overnight. The City of Austin said the essential systems were restored in a matter of hours.
Williamson County said it was also impacted overnight, but the emergency communications’ ability to answer 911 calls or dispatch first responders was not.
Texas DPS closed all driver's license offices across the state because of technical issues.
Baylor Scott and White said they’re continuing to work through issues related to the technical disruption. St. David’s Healthcare said they weren’t directly impacted, but they’re working with vendors who may have been.
"We as a society have to look at the level that we're using technology and the ability to say, do we have resilient either backup systems when it comes to technology or a means of the process in general, to make sure that we are able to continue to operate in a way that we don't disrupt our life and we're just down hard, as they say," Malicoat said.
The CEO of CrowdStrike said on X that the issues have been identified, and a fix has been deployed. He emphasized this was not a security or cyber incident and customers remain fully protected.
"To think that you have a worldwide impact and a set of outages based upon one file in your very popular piece of software, that's concerning," Malicoat said.
It is unclear how long it will take to fix the global issue. Malicoat said IT or security professionals are going to have to physically touch every system to bring it back online.