Worldwide IT outage briefly impacted Las Vegas casinos

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – The IT outage that caused major delays to airlines on Friday also impacted several on and off-the-Strip casinos.

Walking around Palace Station on Friday, an 8 News Now reporter didn’t see any major issues. However, that was a different story Thursday night for the company that owns it: Station Casinos.

“Nobody came around the floor to update us to what timeframe we could be looking at,” Dr. Dana Trippi said.

Trippi said she was gambling inside Red Rock Casino at around 10 p.m. Thursday, when she noticed she couldn’t cash out.

“How about shutting the doors or telling people that, you know, you can’t cash out? Because the machines were working,” Trippi said. “They actually were working until the person cashed out.”

Trippi left without her $97, telling 8 News Now, it wasn’t worth her time to continue staying.

Alex Acuna of Station Casinos told 8 News Now in a statement: “The company had a temporary outage late Thursday night due to a third-party vendor, lasting a few hours.”

MGM Resorts International told 8 News Now, they’re hotels and gaming floors were operating as usual.

However, guests staying at the Aria Resort and Casino sent 8 News Now photos and videos at around 11 am Friday of slot machines not working and a rope around a whole section.

Some of the machines’ displays had blue screens.

When the photos were sent to MGM, the company stated the problems weren’t related to the outage that some are calling the biggest.

“It probably is one of the largest in history just because the massive amount of customers of Crowdstrike,” Shannon Wilkinson, chief technology officer of Tego Cyber, said.

Wilkinson described Crowdstrike as one of the biggest cybersecurity companies in the world.

She stated Crowdstrike operates a software in computers that protects users from viruses.

“What happened last night is that Crowdstrike pushed an update to make sure that they could properly protect their customers, and something in that update was flawed, and it caused what we call in the it industry the blue screen of death,” Wilkinson said.

In regards to Trippi’s problems, Station Casinos told 8 News Now Red Rock management is reaching out to her to address the concerns.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board posted on X Friday it’s monitoring the tech outage and has its agents on standby to offer assistance to impacted gaming license holders.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KLAS.