Northeast State professor blames worldwide outage on human error

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — Friday saw a whirlwind of technological issues on a global scale after an update issued by the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike wreaked havoc on operating systems worldwide.

The outage affected banks, airports and multiple companies.

James Holbrook is the department chair of the Computer Information Technology Department at Northeast State Community College. Holbrook said the outage was caused by human error.

“One of the biggest problems that is a recurring problem is patch management, or sometimes a lack thereof,” Holbrook said. “I really wish I had a nickel for every time that I got a bad patch that caused more problems than it would have fixed, and I would have to back out of the update.”

Holbrook said Crowdstrike’s update was likely pushed out with an error in the code, causing more errors than it intended to fix. He told News Channel 11 that in some instances, outages like the one that occurred Friday can require reboots to individual machines.

“If that’s the case, then this could consume many, many IT hours and this could become far more costly than it already has.”

According to Holbrook, the full effect of the outage will boil down to how long it takes to rectify the issue.

“It could become a more costly issue, really, it’s just going to come down to how long the repair takes,” he said. “And if it takes days to repair this, then during this whole time, these machines are going to be out of service.”

Dr. Michael Lehrfeld, East Tennessee State University’s chief information security officer, joined News Channel 11 live on the air Friday afternoon. Lehrfeld said the scope of an outage like Crowdstrike’s can have a wide reach and impact all aspects of life.

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