CrowdStrike ‘bad update’ said to be the reason for global IT outage

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The IT outage that grounded planes across the world also had its effect in Kansas City. Flights at Kansas City International Airport were canceled. Hospitals were delayed in giving care and it’s because of a security update by CrowdStrike, an IT security firm.

“As far as I know this is one of the largest outages in history,” said Nicole Burres, an information security manager with local IT firm Loquient.

“CrowdStrike had pushed an update, that update was a bad update and it caused the blue screen of death loop for a lot of users.”

She said the cause of the error was purely a mistake.

“I mean it can happen. Mistakes happen with updates. If they were rushing and didn’t quite get there and test them, then that can happen.”

The University of Kansas Health System announced on Friday night, that their IT team would be working through the weekend to get their 17 thousand employees online. Government offices from the DMV, to the Jackson County Assessment Department were closed on Friday.

“It is what it is,” Burres said.

“You just kind of adjust and pivot and get everybody back up as quick as you can.”

Burres said this should be a lesson for everyone in IT.

Part of the preparations are “making sure your business has a good business continuity plan, you have your disaster preparedness done and you are ready to go when something happens. Make sure you have backups and that those backups will work whenever you want to deploy them. Make sure that you’re doing your due diligence before taking certain actions.”

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