Global CrowdStrike IT disruption shuts down city of Modesto computers

The global technology outage that grounded flights and disrupted businesses, government offices and hospitals reached into Tenth Street Place, the city-county government center in downtown Modesto.

Councilman Nick Bavaro said when he visited his office on the sixth floor of Tenth Street Place on Friday around 9 a.m. he was not able to log into his computer and the computers for a receptionist and the City Council’s executive assistant also were down.

But Modesto reported about noon that all of its “public-facing services” were working.

The Associated Press reported the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is at the heart of the disruption. CrowdStrike said the outages happened after it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. CrowdStrike said the outages are not a cyberattack or security breach.

The Associated Press reported CrowdStrike is working on a solution. The Austin, Texas-based company provides software to thousands of companies throughout the world.

The computers were down at some city departments at Tenth Street Place on Friday morning but some computers had come back online.

For instance, they had been down earlier Friday morning at City Finance & Customer Service on the second floor of Tenth Street Place, but city spokeswoman Sonya Severo said they had been restored. The office is where residents can pay their city bills.

“All public-facing City of Modesto services are fully operational,” the city said in a statement issued around noon, “but we are experiencing some delays in back-end processes including our inability to access some of our computing equipment utilized by staff.

“We are currently implementing the recommendations from CrowdStrike to restore our systems to 100%.”

Modesto shares the six-story Tenth Street place with Stanislaus County. County spokeswoman Carissa Lucas said this by text when asked for an update on the county’s computers:

“Some county devices were impacted by the CrowdStrike issue, but our Information Technology team worked overnight to bring them back online. We do not anticipate any impacts to service delivery today.”

The Modesto Police Department and Sheriff’s Department also reported their computers were down, but 911 calls still were being handled and were being dispatched by Stanislaus Regional 911 over the radio.

The city of Turlock reported that its computers were not affected by CrowdStrike outage.

Sign Up for Local Breaking News