The world woke up Friday, July 19, to news of a software bug affecting flights, banking, broadcasters, health care and emergency operations, and Wayne County residents and businesses weren’t immune.
“Due to the Crowdstrike outage, our 911 center was impacted through our vendor. Both our emergency and non-emergency lines have been moved to our backup system,” Wayne County Emergency Operations shared on social media.
Richmond Police Department experienced “temporary downtime” that affected computers but “did not cause any delay or disruption in our services,” according to an RPD news release.
Wayne Bank and Trust locations were initially closed because of a related disruption with its telecommunications vendor. They were able to open by 10 a.m. after backup systems were put in place, according to bank president Mike Gaddis.
An employee answering the phone Friday morning at the Speedway gas station on National Road East in Richmond said the store wasn’t able to take credit cards for payment, but could still accept cash and was otherwise unaffected. Social media comments by residents indicated that some convenience stores and gas stations might have closed altogether.
A phone message played when calling the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Richmond said the branch was experiencing system outages. A customer service representative reached at the Indiana BMV’s contact center confirmed that all of the state’s branch locations are affected by the outage and cannot process any type of transaction. The representative said further updates would be posted online at in.gov/bmv.
The issues began when Crowdstrike, a software and security consulting company, released an update on Thursday to its popular Windows security software that unintentionally disabled servers and computers using the tool. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” the company said in a statement. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Because the software is used by many companies and organizations to protect their infrastructure, the bug’s impact has been widespread. IT departments have been scrambling to obtain and implement the fix, but it can be a slow process that might require physically visiting each affected system.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was working with Crowdstrike, Microsoft and others to “fully assess and address system outages.”