Past outages helped New Orleans City Hall stay online during Cyberstrike outage

The Crowdstrike outage is causing problems across the New Orleans metro area. Travelers flying out of the New Orleans International Airport are facing long lines and flight delays as a result of the glitch. Some business owners in the area aren't able to take credit card payments early this morning. And local branches of the Office of Motor Vehicles as well as other state officers are unable to process orders.

However, the New Orleans City Government made it through the morning relatively unscathed.

"We did have some shared programs through Microsoft that were running a little bit slower," New Orleans homeland security director Collin Arnold said, noting that those systems returned to normal after a reboot.

Arnold noted that 911 systems remained online despite the outage. However, he said EMTs in the field had some problems with their reporting system Friday morning, forcing them to adapt.

"New Orleans EMS had to transition to writing their reports with paper, but that has been resolved," Arnold said.

According to Arnold, the city has multiple redundancies in its computer systems, allowing the city to stay online during a major outage like today's.

"What we have to do and what we've been doing with our ITI department and others is making sure that we don't invest or put all of our eggs in one basket," Arnold said. "We have numerous different providers that can provide different security solutions."

Arnold says that was a lesson city leaders learned the hard way during the 2019 ransomware attack on city hall.

"We had to take to heart and make sure that a lot of our investments were smart and not all in one type of technology," Arnold said.

Arnold added that even though today's outage had minimal impacts on city hall, city leaders will still look to the outage for solutions to future problems.

"Obviously, we all hope that this doesn't happen again, but I think we are all realistic enough to know that we live in a world that relies on technology, relies on computers, and we have to make sure that we're doing everything we can to be ahead of the game when these events occur."