North Texas cities, first responders respond to 'largest IT outage in history'

The cyber issues caused by the disruption following a Windows update from the company, CrowdStrike, forced some emergency crews in North Texas to change their protocols Friday morning.

Both Dallas and Fort Worth say 911 systems were not affected. Fort Worth Police say some online tools were knocked down, but they did not affect responses.

In Fort Worth, the ambulance provider, MedStar, says the outage affected its charting system. MedStar says that meant it was not able to retrieve dispatch information or data from EKG monitors using an internet connection.

MedStar says it has an offline option, so paramedics were still able to perform all the same functions.

"Otherwise, all other systems were a go for us throughout this outage," Desiree Partain wrote in an email.

The City of Dallas says its information and technology services department is "actively assessing the impact on city systems and working with the vendor to remediate the issue as quickly as possible to all services."

"The City's top priority is to maintain stability and minimize disruptions to Public Safety and Critical Infrastructure operations," the City of Dallas wrote in a statement.

On X, CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurz said the issue was connected to a defect found in a content update for Windows. He wrote the issue did not affect Mac or Linux hosts, writing, "This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

Microsoft says its cloud services have been restored as well.

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