Several Fresno County services down after global outage

FRESNO, Calif. ( KSEE/KGPE ) – It was mayhem for people at the Fresno Yosemite International Airport after some people went to the airport as early as last night trying to make their flights -but the outage has prevented that.

“They’re telling us all flights in and out are grounded. So, no one’s coming in. No one’s going out,” said Fresno Yosemite International Airport Traveler, Brandi Guinn.

The global tech outage took a toll on airlines, crew members, and passengers trying to arrive to their destinations.

At first, passengers were told flights were delayed and then canceled.

“It would be another hour, another hour, but we’re still here,” said Nancy Moore, a traveler affected by this incident.

The Clovis Police Department was also affected by the outage.

Sgt. Phil Garcia with The Clovis Police Department says that when the outage happened on Thursday night, officers had trouble with emails and other networks.

“Both dispatchers and officers went kind of back to the origins of this job and broke out a pencil and a pad and started doing everything by hand,” he said.

According to Garcia, 911 services were still operable despite the tech outage.

“There was no interruption to any type of the service we provide community,” he said.

Meanwhile, the County of Fresno experienced a little bit more trouble from the outage.

Eric Matthews, with The County of Fresno, says they took action around midnight after learning the outage stemmed from Crowdstrike

“We did mobilize about 20 of our staff at night to start going to the mission-critical locations that are 24 hours,” he said.

He says EMS services had a strong business continuity plan, allowing them to operate through the outage. However, it took about two hours to get the systems back to normal.

“The first thing we had to do was bring up their actual backend systems, like their servers and stuff like that. And then we had to go on-site to bring up all their workstations so they can log in to their systems.”

Kirsten Martinez, a Fresno State student, says she is in shock after witnessing such a historic global tech meltdown.

“This really opened my eyes to how much power a company like this has and just, you know, to think that one of the flip of a switch and everything is down.”

Reports are calling this the largest IT outage in history.

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