Some Sacramento-area businesses close due to CrowdStrike outage

SACRAMENTO – Popular antivirus software CrowdStrike has caused global outages after an automatic update was pushed out. The outage has impacted airlines, banks, media outlets and businesses.

Sacramento County says some of its public counters were closed Friday, at the building permit center and the coroner's office. Others like the tax collection center were able to reopen after a few hours. Some local hospitals said they've been monitoring their operations.

Broadway Sacramento closed its box office.

"We will probably lose half our business today," said Sally Slocum, who works for the ticket office at Broadway Sacramento.

They're closed until further notice.

"Because bad guys continually put out threats, cybersecurity products need to continually have refreshed updates to understand how to block those threats and it's one of those updates that's caused this issue," said Chief Security Evangelist Eset Tony Anscombe.

"When we got in had a pow-wow with my staff and our CEO, we all agreed what is the reason to open or answer phones if we just say sorry there's nothing we can do," said Slocum.

IT experts say this isn't a quick fix and it's because this specific crash requires manual reboots. A person has to fix each machine in person, which can take a lot of time for bigger corporations. It's unclear at this time what exactly went wrong with the update.

"It's important that businesses have cyber resilience plans in place and test their operating without the cyber connection because this could happen a power outage an incident outage a natural disaster," said Anscombe.

Anscombe says this outage might heighten the requirement for businesses to have plans in place should this happen in the future.

CBS13 reached out to our local hospitals. Kaiser and Dignity Health say they have some impacts, but their facilities are open and they are treating patients.

We also spoke with a spokesperson for Sacramento International Airport who says things got back to normal around 7 a.m. Friday for them after, according to the FAA, multiple airlines grounded all flights.

But one couple who says they were on their flight taxiing for takeoff back home to Virginia, when the pilot turned off the engine and announced the ground stop. They've been trying to get back on a flight ever since Thursday night.

"Five in the morning we found I think it was the last room in the Wyndham. We had gone to other hotels along the way, they were all shut down. They were either full or shut down because of the software problem," said Ralph Saunders.

Saunders also happens to be in the IT industry.

"I've been in the industry for almost 50 years. There's no excuse for what happened," he said.

"All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority," CrowdStrike said in a statement.

They also mentioned that this was not a cyberattack.