Oak Ridge Schools affected Friday by faulty Microsoft update

A faulty Microsoft system update that shutdown airports and affected other industries across the world Friday, also impacted Oak Ridge Schools .

"Our IT team has been working furiously this morning and our infrastructure should be back to 100% within the hour," Molly Gallagher Smith, the school system's communications specialist, said Friday morning. "We did not experience total outage for staff members, but will be addressing those staff members experiencing issues with their devices throughout the day."

She said a number of staff members were unable to boot up their computers and log in.

By mid-afternoon Friday, Smith said the school system still had individual users who couldn't use their devices, but the schools' computer systems were all working correcting. She said the IT personnel were having to manually deal with each device and that most of the users still having problems were being loaned devices.

Oak Ridge Schools begin a new school year on Monday, July 22.

The Oak Ridger sent out questions to several entities in Oak Ridge about the problem. Here are the replies received:

• NOT AFFECTED: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12 National Security Complex, Anderson County Schools, the city of Oak Ridge government, Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge and its parent company, Covenant Health.

The USA TODAY NETWORK reported that 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 that the incident was "not a security incident or cyberattack."

Crowdstrike is the Oak Ridge Schools anti-virus vendor, Smith said.

"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," said a statement from Crowdstrike. Microsoft, meanwhile, said "the underlying cause has been fixed," but that residual impacts continue to affect some of its Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Users of Microsoft365 reported outages that took down personal computers, airlines, media companies, banks, and telecom firms around the world. The software giant stated it was working Friday to resolve a problem "impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services."

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Oak Ridge Schools affected Friday by faulty Microsoft update