Philly’s technology operations back up after being affected by global outage

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management was among the first to notice something was up with their computer systems in the aftermath of the latest Microsoft-CrowdStrike update, which led to global issues that grounded flights and shut down hospitals and banks.

Around 1 a.m., Director Dominic Mireles said, the 24-hour watch desk began seeing computer issues, which is not unusual on the surface, but police and fire radio were also having issues so they turned to their back-up plan.

“I am proud to say the office of emergency management did not lose critical service even in that initial disruption,” Mireles said in a presser held on Friday detailing the impact of the outage on city systems and its recovery.

911 was not affected, but police district computers were. And Commissioner Kevin Bethel said one of the first priorities was restoring prisoner processing, which is now fully operational again.

“We immediately dispatched those teams out to those areas,” said Bethel.

Chief Information Officer Melissa Scott said there was some impact on every server and computer powered up on the city network as a result of the outage.

“Employee systems were completely inoperable and when they came in and saw their computers, what they saw was that daunting blue screen,” she said.

Scott said technicians went to every department to delete the Microsoft-CrowdStrike update that caused the problem from each computer and server individually. It’s a process she said will continue through the weekend so everyone is back to normal on Monday.

In the meantime, she warned about phishing scams, which she said sometimes exploit an incident like this.