Oneida, Madison Counties among those impacted by tech outage. What you need to know

From Madison and Oneida County to the United Kingdom and beyond, a major technology outage has closed DMVs, grounded flights, and disrupted operations around the globe in an incident a cybersecurity firm blamed on a faulty system update.

CrowdStrike, a U.S. firm that advertises being used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, said one of its recent content updates had a defect that impacted Microsoft's Windows Operating System, adding the incident was "not a security incident or cyberattack."

County issues

In Madison and Oneida County, the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles are closed until further notice. Madison County released a statement saying its IT Department is working through emergency plans and is getting departments back up and running.

“I want to thank our IT and 911 staff for identifying the CrowdStrike issue quickly and getting public safety services back up and running in the middle of the night,” Madison County Board Chairman James Cunningham said. “Madison County IT and Emergency Management have worked through our IT Incidence Response Plan and are getting departments back up and running one by one. As of 10:30 a.m., 98% of Madison County computers are back up and running. Services are back except for some of those provided by New York State. We thank the public for their patience during this time.”

For Oneida County, its county clerk's office is closed until further notice, but its department of family and community services is operational and offering services. However, the department has been impacted due to lack of access to New York State computer systems and is instead utilizing paper documentation.

“The county’s 911 System has not been affected by the outage, nor has the response to the Rome tornado,” the statement said.

Crowdstrike

Crowdstrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, apologized for the disruptions in an interview with NBC's Today, adding that the issue had been identified and isolated, and a fix has been deployed. Microsoft, meanwhile, said "the underlying cause has been fixed," but residual impacts will affect some of its Microsoft 365 apps and services.

President Joe Biden has been briefed on the CrowdStrike outage and his team is in touch with the cybersecurity firm, as well as with impacted companies and agencies, according to the White House. Biden will receive "sector-by-sector updates throughout the day and is standing by to provide assistance as needed," the White House added.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement it is working to "fully assess and address system outages."

DHS added it's working alongside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as CrowdStrike, Microsoft and federal, state, local and critical infrastructure partners to get a grasp on the incident and its impacts.

Across the U.S., hundreds of flights were canceled Friday morning. American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines were among those who grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved a cloud-services-related outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

Impact

Public transit systems in the U.S. reported impacts. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C., said its "website and some of our internal systems are currently down," but that trains and buses were running as scheduled.

In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority also said its buses and trains were unaffected but that "some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline due to a worldwide technical outage."

Around the world, the outages disrupted London's Stock Exchange, caused major train delays in the U.K., sent British broadcaster Sky News off air, forced medical facilities in Europe and the U.S. to cancel some services and caused disruptions at airports in Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong and India.

Several state and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. reported issues at 911 call centers. Such disruptions were reported in Virginia, Arizona, Iowa and Alaska, according to officials' statements and media reports.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement on X it's "closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines" and that several airlines "have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved."

Dubai International Airport said on X it is operating normally following "a global system outage that affected the check-in process for some airlines." It added the affected airlines "promptly switched to an alternate system, allowing normal check-in operations to resume swiftly."