A global technology outage caused after a company that provides security services to many multinational companies and governments alike sent out a flawed update Thursday night has hit local communities, too.
City offices in Banks were without phones for about two hours Friday morning. And Washington County is still dealing with the fallout.
“Our Department of Information Technology Services has been working on addressing these issues throughout the morning and has made progress on several high-priority systems,” Washington County said in a press release.
Speculation that the outage, already being called the largest tech outage in history, was a cyberattack is false, the company, the county, and pretty much everyone with knowledge of the situation.
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“By all accounts this outage was NOT a cyberattack but simply a failed attempt by a third-party at updating critical software,” Washington County said.
CrowdStrike, the company responsible, apologized for the “inconvenience and disruption” caused by the outage, which has so far seen planes grounded, hospitals cancel surgeries, 911 systems come crashing down, and more.
Mobile ordering for Starbucks customers was halted, too.
CrowdStrike said the issue was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
More information was promised on a rolling basis on their blog.
At the county level, the impact was significant. Several employees working remotely via a secured virtual private network (VPN) were disconnected from the internet on their work computers and had to travel back to their work locations to reconnect, Washington County spokesperson Philip Bransford said in an email to this newspaper.
That issue has since been fixed.
“About 100 other employees experienced “blue screen” errors when trying to boot up their desktop or laptop,” Bransford said. “Again, these employees needed to physically come to a Washington County building so that members of our ITS department could walk through the steps needed to return their computers to full functionality,” he added.
VOIP and voicemail services were down part of Friday, too.
“It is important to note that there have so far been no security incidents with the County’s systems during this outage,” Bransford said.
The county holds confidential personal data, manages a jail, and maintains traffic control systems throughout Washington County.
“Our high-priority systems and networks have either been unaffected or have recovered with minimal impact to operations,” he said.
Bransford also praised the work of the county ITS staff, who he described as heroic, in their work, which lasted through the night and into the early hours of Friday morning to undo the damage done by CrowdStrike’s error.
“Our ITS team has done outstanding work throughout this event and we are grateful for their service,” he said.
“As Washington County continues to recover from the outage, the availability of some services may be affected,” the county said. “Although our usual hours of operation for Washington County buildings have not changed, please use email to contact departments and offices if you have any questions regarding the availability of services.”
This story has been updated with more information from Washington County on the impact to their staff.
Chas Hundley is the editor of the Banks Post and sister news publications the Gales Creek Journal and the Salmonberry Magazine. He grew up in Gales Creek and has a cat.
