photo by: AP File

The logo of Microsoft is seen outside it's French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, Monday May 13, 2024.

Updated at 3:23 p.m. Friday, July 19

A global tech outage Friday caused by a faulty software update is having some impacts locally.

The software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected computers across the globe running Microsoft Windows. It was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologized and said a fix was on the way, according to The Associated Press.

The Douglas County Treasurer’s Office is unable to process motor vehicle transactions because the Kansas Department of Revenue is having issues with its system, a spokeswoman with the county told the Journal-World Friday.

“Some staff computers were impacted this morning,” spokeswoman Karrey Britt said. “Our IT Department staff has worked diligently to get computers back up and running. They expect to have all employees back up soon.”

Additionally, the online system for court records was inaccessible Friday morning, but the circumstances around that weren’t entirely clear.

The public access portal and the online pay site (paykscourts.com), both state systems, were unavailable, according to Douglas County District Court. However, court services are still available by visiting Douglas County District Court in person.

“Systems are coming back online, so it has been a fluid situation,” Britt said.

The issues affected the City of Lawrence too.

Brian Thomas, the city’s IT director, said city IT staff were alerted in the early-morning hours on Friday. Thomas said as of noon Friday, the city had 90% of its devices working, but some cloud-based apps that were affected were being remediated by the cloud vendor(s).

The Lawrence Police Department said its systems were not affected.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said the Douglas County Emergency Communications Center is operational and can handle 911 calls and the radio system for first responders.

“The Sheriff’s Office is also not experiencing any outages, and it is currently not affecting any of our critical services or abilities to maintain public safety in the community,” said George Diepenbrock, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office.

LMH Health was having some issues with its third-party systems related to pre-approvals of patients’ financial eligibility information and with provider documentation services, but overall the hospital is functioning normally, said Vice President and Chief Information Officer Michael Williams.

“It’s creating some inconvenience for our providers,” Williams said, but “we are still able to take care of our patients; it is just making it a little more challenging for our staff.”

Baldwin City systems were unaffected, said city communications director Lynn Meador, but the Baldwin City school district’s registration and fee payment system were experiencing issues. The school district issued a release on social media saying that an unplanned PowerSchool outage had occurred Thursday evening: “While that has been resolved and PowerSchool and e-Registration are fully functional, we have been advised there may be some impacts today due to the ongoing repercussions from global technology outages. In addition, while our RevTrak store is available, users may experience issues with credit card payments and processing.”

When the Lawrence school district was asked about possible impacts there, spokeswoman Julie Boyle said that the district’s technology director, David Vignery, had found that internally managed systems were not affected but that some third-party products used by the district “have had issues, starting last night and on and off today.” Vignery said staff would continue to keep an eye on the situation, “but our systems are looking good right now.”

The City of Eudora said the CrowdStrike outage should not interrupt city operations.

“Our software to remotely command electricity meters is not working, but we have a manual workaround, so there should be no impact on customers,” said Eudora City Manager Kevyn Gero.

Kansas’ Office of Information Technology Services confirmed in a news release Friday afternoon that the faulty software update from its vendor partner CrowdStrike has impacted services for executive branch agencies in the state.

“This was not a cybersecurity attack and there is no threat to life safety services,” the release said.

CrowdStrike has provided fixes, the release said, and Kansas’ IT office is working closely with it and the executive branch agencies to remediate any issues.

Services continue to be restored online, the office said, but it could not provide an estimated time for each service’s restoration.

The Journal-World has reached out to other entities who may be affected and will update this story as more information becomes available.

Here’s more information about the outage from AP:

How did Friday’s global outage happen?

Friday’s disruptions began when a faulty update was pushed out from CrowdStrike for one of its tools, “Falcon.” In a statement about the ongoing situation, the company said the defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” — noting that Mac and Linux systems were not impacted.

But, because scores of companies rely on CrowdStrike for their security needs with Windows as their operating system, the consequences of this kind of technical problem have been far-reaching.

Long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services during peak summer travel. Banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages impacting payments and online services. And hospitals had problems with their appointment systems, leading to delays and sometimes cancelations for critical care, while officials in some U.S. states warned of 911 problems in their areas.

Experts stress that Friday’s disruptions underscore the vulnerability of worldwide dependence on software that comes from only a handful of providers.

“It is an ‘all our eggs are in one basket’ situation,” Craig Shue, professor and computer science department head at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said in emailed commentary. “This lets us make sure our ‘basket’ is high quality: the software provider tries to identify threats and respond to them quickly. But at the same time, if anything goes wrong and the basket fails, we have a lot of broken eggs.”

What is CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is a U.S. cybersecurity company that provides software to companies around the world and across industries. It bills itself as being the globe’s most advanced cloud-based security technology provider.

“We stop breaches,” the cybersecurity firm writes on its website.

According to the company’s website, CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 and launched in early 2012. CrowdStrike listed on the Nasdaq exchange five years ago. Last month, the Austin, Texas company reported that its revenue rose 33% in the latest quarter from the same quarter a year earlier — logging a net profit of $42.8 million, up from $491,000 in the first quarter of last year.

CrowdStrike has a partnership with Amazon Web Services and its “Falcon for Defender” security technology is designed to supplement Microsoft Defender to prevent attacks.

Is there a fix?

Disruptions on Friday have continued hours after CrowdStrike first identified the issue. But both the company and Microsoft say that they’re working to get systems back online.

In an emailed statement, Crowdstrike said that it was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” — adding that a fix “had been deployed” for the identified issue.

Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”

Spokesperson Frank X. Shaw later added that the company was “actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.” Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft are also appearing to engage IT personnel on official online channels, such as Reddit.