A massive outage in Microsoft Windows caused computers around the world to freeze early Friday morning, causing flight cancellations and delays and hampering courthouses and government functions in the Bay Area.
Sometime after 2 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, a global cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike initiated a software update for a product called Falcon, causing numerous Windows client computers and servers to crash.
“It’s called the “blue screen of death,” said Levent Ertaul, a cybersecurity expert and chair of the Department of Computer Science at California State University, East Bay. “Imagine if all the Windows computers and servers and client computers in large corporations suddenly had this screen. It affects hospitals, airports, 911 calls, courthouses, schools, banks, public transportation, you name it.”
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CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz released a statement on social media around 2:45 a.m. saying the outage was not the result of a cyberattack and that the issue “had been identified, isolated, and a fix implemented.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company is working with CrowdStrike to help customers with “guidance and support.”
However, on Friday morning, organizations and public services in the Bay Area reported varying degrees of disruptions due to the bug.
For example, a spokesperson for San Francisco International Airport said that while all systems were back online, there were still remnants of the fallout. resulted in 87 flight cancellations and 196 flight delays.
Superior court services were also disrupted in at least two Bay Area counties, but court hearings and other services were not canceled.
In Santa Clara County, IT teams worked through the night to get courtroom computers, safety and security systems, and the clerk’s office up and running.
A spokesman for the Alameda County courts said people are required to attend their hearings despite the computer outage, which primarily took down case management systems and dozens of computers.
“We are working diligently to fix our systems,” said Presiding Judge Thomas Nixon. “Our dedicated staff, from our Office of Information Technology to our clerks, will continue to ensure that our community has access to the courts.”
Several city and county governments were also busy making system repairs Friday, including Contra Costa County, which reported problems with operations, remote access and library services.
“We are doing everything we can to minimize the impact of this while CrowdStrike works to address the broader, ongoing security concerns,” county officials said on social media Friday morning.
The alarming outage also affected Monterey County, which has since resolved the problem in several core systems, including the county’s main hospital.
“Natividad Medical Center experienced minor disruptions in the early morning hours of Friday, July 19. However, these issues were quickly resolved and all workstations are functioning normally,” county officials said in a news release. “Hospital operations continue without interruption and patient care remains unaffected.”
City officials in Oakland said “many computers” had crashed but the 911 service was operational.
The U.S. Social Security Administration announced that all of its offices will remain closed Friday due to the software glitch. However, people can still use the phone line (800) 772-1213 or the website www.ssa.gov.
Ertaul said cloud computing functions and servers are likely to be recovered sooner than client computers, as each computer must be managed individually and personally by IT professionals.
He also said the world must prepare for similar technological implosions in the future.
“This shows us two very important things, one is how dependent we are on technology and two is how fragile that dependency is, those are the lessons we need to learn,” Ertaul said. “Things are becoming too complex and not easy to manage, and I think we need to prepare for these kinds of problems in the future.”
Moreover, the massive Windows outage was not the result of a cyberattack, but it could lead to security vulnerabilities in large computer networks.
“Does it create a weakness in the overall security perimeter? It could and someone could exploit that downtime in security,” Ertaul said.
