Alabama Medicaid Agency impacted by Crowdstrike outage

The offices of the Alabama Medicaid Agency, as seen on January 24, 2023. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

The Alabama Medicaid Agency said Friday it had been affected by the global system outage caused by a glitch in a software update to Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity program.

The agency canceled a Friday afternoon meeting on dental services “because of system outages and other circumstances,” said Melanie Cleveland, spokesperson for Alabama Medicaid.

Cleveland confirmed the agency uses the Crowdstrike software.

“It’s the same outage for everyone worldwide,” she said.

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Representatives of the governor’s office; the Alabama Department of Public Health and the Alabama State Board of Education said Friday morning they were not impacted. Danne Howard, deputy director for the Alabama Hospital Association, and John Matson, spokesperson for the Alabama Nursing Home Association, said that they have not heard from members about any issues.

“I don’t want to definitively say, ‘No, we’re not having problems,’ because I don’t know that for a fact, of course, but none have been reported to me anyway,” Matson said.

Crowdstrike, based in Austin, said early Friday morning that an update to its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows systems to crash and display a blue screen, according to Reuters .

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz stated that this was not a security concern or cyberattack.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” he stated on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The outage has led to issues including flight cancellations and problems at retailers worldwide. Airlines such as American Airlines and Southwest Airlines experienced system difficulties due to their reliance on Microsoft services for operations.

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