Global internet outage effects Broome County offices

BROOME COUNTY, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – It happened overnight; an internet outage has affected airlines, banks, emergency centers, and government agencies across the world including here in Broome County.

The worldwide outage is a result of the cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike. The company partners with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Defender to prevent cyber-attacks.

In a public statement CrowdStrike says the incident was not a cyberattack or breach of security, but rather a defect in a software update that affected specifically Windows operating systems.

A majority of the Broome County office buildings were closed to the public while computers and services are slowly being brought back online.

The county executive, Jason Garnar is hopeful that every county office will be re-opened on Monday.

“In order to fix this, our IT staff had to make individual fixes to each county computer, and they’ve been doing that since the early morning. They’ve been doing the best they can. They’re working around the clock to resolve this outage and have our departments back up and running,” Garnar said.

Garnar says certain departments including the DMV and DSS operate under New York state systems, so those services must be restored by the state, which could take several days. He says that if you have an appointment or plan to go out somewhere, it couldn’t hurt to call ahead, and make sure the organization is operational.

Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar says although he had to close the office this morning, the outage has not affected safety.

“For the better part of 215 years, the office of the sheriff has been protecting the citizens of Broome County, long before there were computers in cars or computers in offices. The men and women of the office of the sheriff are going out on behalf of the people and protecting them. Nothing today in terms of the technology issue that we’re all dealing with changes that,” said Akshar.

The county says it will be announcing updates throughout the weekend on the county website, gobroomecounty.com .

If your personal computer or business has been affected by the outage, the county says to contact Crowd Strike directly to fix the problem.

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