Which Texas state agencies are affected by Microsoft, CrowdStrike outages?

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — The technology outage that affected companies, agencies and airlines globally Friday morning caused disruptions to Texas state agencies overseeing infrastructure, safety and transportation.

The faulty software update issued by Austin-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air worldwide, according to reporting from the Associated Press.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told NBC’s ‘TODAY Show’ that his company identified what caused the outage and is working to fix it rapidly.

“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with a Microsoft operating system,” Kurtz said. “And as systems come back online, as they’re rebooted, they’re coming up, and they’re working. And now we are working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online.”

Kurtz emphasized that the outage was not a result of a cyberattack infiltrating CrowdStrike’s system.

“Our mission is wide, we’re here to make sure that every customer is fully recovered,” Kurtz said. “And we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were. And we continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”

What state agencies have been impacted?

The Texas Secretary of State reported on X Friday morning that several of its systems are down. They said they are working to get them back up.

The Texas Department of Public Safety also announced on X that its Driver’s License Offices are affected by the outage. The post detailed that all DLOs will be closed on Friday until they can resolve the issue, but there is no current estimate on when exactly they will be back open.

The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles also reported closures on Friday in a post on X . TxDMV said they were affected by the global CrowdStrike outages and that several of its systems and services were unavailable during that time.

The Texas Military Department told Nexstar that they have not been affected by the outage because they primarily use Starlink, a satellite internet subsidiary of SpaceX owned by Elon Musk.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) told Nexstar that none of its public-facing systems have been affected by the CrowdStrike outage. TxDOT did not specify whether its internal systems were affected.

The Railroad Commission of Texas told Nexstar that they experienced a temporary system interruption this morning due to the global CrowdStrike outage but many of those have now been restored. The Commission has not received reports of the outage causing a significant impact on energy operations.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas posted on X that its website has been affected by the CrowdStrike outage. They reported that they are working to restore the platform.

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) told Nexstar that the CrowdStrike software glitch on Friday affected its IT systems and employee laptops, primarily impacting filing and reporting access. Despite this, gatehouses, security, surveillance, and body cameras remained functional, and daily operations with youth in residence were unaffected.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) experienced similar complications from the outages with disruptions to internal-facing systems. TDCJ told Nexstar the outage had little impact on the agency’s key operations and, where necessary, it is implementing continuity of operations plans.

CrowdStrike, an Austin-based company , issued a faulty software update Friday morning, which affects all Microsoft 365 platforms. As of February 2024, over 72% of Desktop PC owners use the Windows operating system, according to Statista .

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