Technology outages impact Colorado on Friday

A global technology outage impacting airline flights, banking and hospitals appears to have had a minimal impact on Colorado.

While some hospitals elsewhere have reported disruptions, local health care systems appear to have largely sidestepped the issue.

The biggest impact appears to be on Regional Transportation District light rail lines, and the state's Division of Motor Vehicles.

DMV officials reported: "Due to the major Crowdstrike incident, the Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles is currently experiencing outages that affect most services."

Officials offered no timeline of when services would be restored.

Dane Roper, a Denver Health spokesperson, described the impact of the technology outage to the health system as “minimal,” but declined to provide specifics.

“Right now, there has been no impact to patient care and we’ve dispatched IT professionals throughout our locations to resolve any issues with computers on site,” Roper said in an email to The Denver Gazette.

The health system’s IT team, Roper said, was “triaging and working to resolve any issues that arise.”

Denver Health is the county's safety-net health system for the poor.

CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, had a software update malfunction today that has impacted airline flights, banking and hospitals.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a statement Friday. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Denver International Airport officials warned passengers early Friday to check with their carriers before heading out to the airport. Flightaware was showing less than 100 DIA flights canceled or delayed early Friday.

The RTD reported via X about 6:30 a.m. Friday: "D Line suspended between i-25/Broadway and Union Station due to a communications failure. ... Expect significant delays on light rail lines."

Shuttle busses are in place between Littleton/Mineral, and I-25/Broadway, according to RTD.

Within the City and County of Denver, the Joint Information Center has reported the CrowdStrike outage is affecting some services like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but other impacts have been more limited.

Problems began to develop overnight but overall impacts are “minimal” according to a spokesperson.

“We continue to address and resolve issues as they arise. We do not have an estimated time of resolution as this is part of much larger national outage,” an emailed statement said. “Some city employees were unable to login to their computer this morning, but our Technology Services team is working to reboot them and get them back up and running.”

This story is developing.