Mayor Wheeler declares state of emergency due to Microsoft outage

PORTLAND, Ore. ( KOIN ) — Portland mayor Ted Wheeler declared a state of emergency Friday morning after a Microsoft outage.

The outage, which also caused flights around the world to be halted , was caused by a defect in a content update according to CrowdStrike, who provide cybersecurity for Microsoft Windows.

According to CrowdStrike, a fix has been released, but many local businesses are still feeling the burn.

According to Wheeler, the outage took out over half the city’s servers, data centers, and employee computers. That included some of the computers and servers for the Bureau of Emergency Communications overnight.

“The  Bureau of Emergency Communication call takers had to work manually overnight for several hours, and I want to thank them for that,” Wheeler said.

Officials said at no time was the community’s ability to make 911 calls impacted, with the Computer Aided Dispatch system back up and running by 6 a.m. Friday. The Bureau of Emergency Management also partially activated an emergency coordination center to help streamline a citywide response to this emergency.

“We have forms and paper that they just track calls on. Similarly, within Police and Fire bureaus, they do the same thing. So again, like I said, it’s exercised routinely,” said the Director of Portland Bureau of Emergency Shad Ahmed. “They didn’t have to make this up. It’s something that they plan for. “

The outage also impacted Portland International Airport, knocking out some systems but they are back online as of Friday morning.

Nationally, hundreds of flights ended up being canceled and many at PDX were forced to wait while systems came back online. By Friday afternoon, large lines of people could still be seen in the PDX airport, having waited for hours, to find out about connecting flights after the outage.

“We have no idea when we are leaving,” said Andrew Lyngen, a traveler headed to Lansing, Michigan. “Just smile and nod, keep going, adapt and overcome.”

Another flyer at PDX told KOIN 6 that this was their first time flying alone and they ended up in this situation.

“This is actually my first time flying alone,” they said. “My parents were like you got this. They believe in me. I was visiting a friend here for a week and now I am in this crazy mess.”

As of 8 a.m., the FlyPDX site shows over 50 delays and 9 canceled flights across several airlines.

Local Providence hospitals lost access to health records overnight due to the issues, however as of Friday morning they have regained access the hospital said in a statement. Some of their workstations are still impacted.

Providence, like other organizations around the world, is impacted by the CrowdStrike outage. Our IT teams have been working overnight to respond to the issue and have restored key functionality in the Epic electronic health record so that nurses, physicians and other caregivers can access patient records and perform clinical documentation. However, other clinical applications and workstations continue to be impacted, and our IT teams are working to restore these services as soon as possible. Patient safety and access to care is always the top priority at Providence. We will provide updates as new information becomes available.

Stay tuned as we bring you updates to this story.

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