East Texas cities, businesses impacted by global technology outage

UPDATE: The City of Jacksonville said that services are back online.

JACKSONVILLE, Texas ( KETK ) – Some East Texas cities and businesses are experiencing service disruptions caused by a global technology outage.

Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced one of their updates had a defect that caused outages in banks, hospitals, and other industries nationwide on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. An update took computers offline, then caused a “recovery boot loop” which prevented systems from restarting quickly.

The cities of Jacksonville and Palestine both took to Facebook to warn customers about service interruptions with processing payments. Jacksonville announced their online and phone payments were back online a few hours later. As of 11:45 a.m., Palestine City Hall can only accept checks or cash payments as their systems remain down.

In addition, the Nacogdoches Water Utility Billing Office said they are unable to process payments online or answer account-related questions. They said no water shut offs or late fees will be assessed during the outage, and provided the following list of alternate locations where people can pay their bills in person:

• KJs Convenience Store – 4712 South St.
• H & Z – 1626 N University Dr.
• H & Z Tobacco Store – 1130 N University Dr.
• Tobacco Barn #402 – 1216 South St.
• Carniceria Y Fruteria Las – 2904 South St.
• Lucky Stop #5 – 1516 E Main St.
• Lucky Stop 4 – 1930 Douglass Rd.
• Lucky Stop #2 – 1324 South St.
• Lucky Stop – 1218 Douglass Rd.

The Texas Department of Public Safety announced driver’s license offices across the state are closed due to the CrowdStrike issue, with no estimate on when the offices will be able to reopen.

Businesses are also experiencing outages. Brookshire Grocery Company said several of their stores are impacted by the issue and are temporarily closed.

“Our IT team is quickly working to resolve the technical issues at the impacted stores. We are hopeful that all stores will reopen soon, once the issues have been resolved. Our team has already been able to resolve several stores’ connection this morning so far. We regret the inconvenience this has caused our customers and are thankful for their patience and understanding,” according to their statement.

CrowdStrike issued a statement saying the issue “is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Some TV broadcasts went dark, airlines canceled flights and 911 services in Alaska, New Hampshire and Ohio are down. Though the company says a fix was deployed, issues are persisting into the afternoon.

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