Locals react to nationwide CrowdStrike outage

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — In case you missed it, there was a nationwide outage for companies that use CrowdStrike following an update sent out by the tech group. So what does that mean?

Shannon McMurtrey, Associate Professor of Cyber-Risk Management at Drury University says there’s not much to worry about if you don’t use CrowdStrike.

“Most users are not going to be impacted by this. Users at home, for example. Most small companies probably won’t be impacted if you’re not a customer of CrowdStrike, you’re probably okay,” McMurtrey said. “CrowdStrike is one of the leading, ironically, cybersecurity firms in the in the world. So the companies that use them are the big companies that unfortunately are in pretty critical areas.”

OzarksFirst checked back in with the Springfield-Branson National Airport to get an update on flights and how they can impact travelers.

“It’s definitely been an evolving situation. Systems are starting to come back on line. Airlines flights are starting to resume. But this is definitely going to take many hours to recover within the system nationwide,” Brian Weiler, Airport Director said. “We’ve had situations in the past where maybe one airline has a computer issue or something like that. This is truly hitting the majority of aircraft. We didn’t even have our first commercial departure until 9:00 this morning where we would normally have ten departures before that time.”

Cole and Courtney Gann, along with their children Carter and Crosby were planning on going to Florida.

“This is the first time we’ve had a major vacation crisis,” Courtney said.

“We came up here to fly out to Florida today for vacation and everything online said everything was good. We got to the airport and it’s canceled,” Cole said.

The family says they’re working to find an alternative way if needed.

“We are looking at other airports in the area, whether it’s St Louis or Tulsa or anywhere, and trying to figure out how to get there before our Air BnB rental expires,” Cole said.

Another flyer, Ryan Eady is also trying to get to Florida but ran into the same issue.

“We’re heading to St. Petersburg today. My flight just got canceled,” Eady said. “On my phone app it said it was still active, still going. So we’ll see what happens.”

Eady calls the ordeal stressful.

“It’s pretty stressful. Been planning this for a while, but not much you can do about it, you know?”

Another traveler, Travis Engh and his coworker Ben Madison landed this afternoon from Denver, but said it wasn’t easy getting home.

“We were having some troubles getting out of Denver today and just a lot of blue screens everywhere and directories all down, everywhere,” Engh said.

Weiler says there could be impacts felt through the weekend, and maybe longer down the road.

“This will impact flights for likely days going forward as the system again gets everything back up to where it needs to be and the passengers where they ultimately need to go,” Weiler said. “The best thing is even if you have flights later tonight into this weekend, watch the airline data that’s coming out. Contact your airline to get the updates that are there. The airports really have limited control in this area. So really the best information they’re going to get is from the airline that they bought the ticket from.”

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