SF officials say bulk of city IT systems spared in global tech outage

San Francisco officials said The City’s information-technology systems were spared from an overnight, global cybersecurity-services outage that grounded numerous airline flights.

A faulty system update from the U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike issued overnight and caused global outages to a range of online systems Friday. The effects were most prominent in Microsoft Windows computers.

Officials from the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said The City’s IT systems were not affected by the outage, as a majority do not use the impacted software. Some issues were reported and are being looked into by local officials, they said.

“At this time, the greatest residual impacts identified are to individual airline operations,” Denny Machuca-Grebe, a DEM public-relations officer, told The Examiner in a statement. “Travelers should contact their airline directly to determine the status of their flights.”

Doug Yakel, a public information officer for San Francisco International Airport , said “[airport] systems are functioning and airlines report systems are back online” as of late Friday morning.

FlightAware, a website that tracks and monitors air traffic, showed that SFO had 223 flights delayed and 89 cancellations as of noon Friday. A majority of the cancellations and delays stemmed from United Airlines, with Delta Airlines being the second-most impacted carrier.

Local public transportation, ranging from BART’s rail service to the Muni trains and buses operated by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency , was also spared from the effects of the outage. BART reported Friday morning that service was running normally.

Erica Kato, an SFMTA spokesperson, told The Examiner that SFMTA operations weren’t impacted, either.

“Our most important systems are not connected to the internet,” she said.

The Department of Emergency Management said it would provide additional updates as officials continued assessing impacts throughout The City.

“The City is working with internal partners and external vendors to further identify and address any residual issues to IT systems,” Machuca-Grebe said.