No major public safety impacts during CrowdStrike outage, city of Austin says

AUSTIN (KXAN) — While the global tech outage caused by CrowdStrike “impacted the City’s internal systems overnight,” a spokesperson said, “the outage did not impact 911.”

However, the Computer Aided Dispatch – or CAD – system was hit overnight.

“Dispatchers used radios while staff worked to restore CAD,” a city spokesperson said in an email.

A source within the Austin Police Department said during this outage, patrol officers lost access to the computers in their patrol vehicles and could not access the CAD system. This resulted in officers receiving information about emergency calls via dispatch radios vs. the CAD system, and officers taking hand-written notes about the emergency calls.

Police said the secondary CAD system activated is called “CAD down mode, which is essentially going back to pen and paper.”

“It is crucial to have a backup due to unforeseen instances, like the CrowdStrike outage. The Austin Police Department has an obligation to protect and serve our community, and it is crucial for APD to have the capability to answer and respond to emergency calls at all times,” the department said in an email.

Travis County Sheriff’s Office impact

The outage hit the Travis County Sheriff’s Office’s CAD system, but it did not impact each individual computer. So, some computers still had the CAD system running.

The agency said everything was fully restored by Friday morning.

This did not lead to a delay in 911 response times.

Austin 311 impact

Austin’s 311 call center was offline for about three hours overnight.

“The outage affected the Utility Contact Center’s ability to dispatch crews for anyone experiencing a power outage for about three hours overnight, but teams were able to be dispatched manually and systems were up and running by early this morning with little impact to customers.,” the City said in a statement.

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