Local IT companies discuss what led to the global tech outage and if there’s a chance for another

WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – After a massive IT outage affected millions of computers and workstations across the globe, 22News talked to a local IT company about the outage and whether it might happen again.

Engineers at Entre Technologies in West Springfield were alerted to the issue at 3 a.m. and spent most of the morning automating fixes for its customers. They say it was reportedly a defect in Crowdstrike’s latest software update that was installed on computers running the Windows operating system.

This caused blue screen errors to appear across multiple locations, including retailers, banks, and airlines. Additionally, it was mostly likely caused by human error or improper testing of the update pushed.

CrowdStrike says this was not a cyberattack but rather an oversight of the organization’s content development team. Although the incident does not appear to be rooted in malicious intent, hackers might still try to disrupt systems.

“Between now and the next couple of days, when everything is kind of ironed out, the bad guys, the bad actors are going to be pretty hard at work to try and confuse the issue and make it easy for them to get into networks. So people need to be extra vigilant,” said Service manager of Entre Technologies, Craig Slozak.

Tom Campanelli of Bloo Solutons, Inc. in Chicopee tells 22News, that an incident like today’s can happen again. “This is true for any software tool installed on a computer system. As Microsoft and Crowdstrike continue to remediate the issue, it showcases the importance of thorough product testing, rollback capabilities, and data backups of computer systems to minimize downtime and potential data loss.”

Due to this error, the company lost $8.5 billion in market capitalization. The stock is down 12 percent from yesterday’s close.

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