Jul. 19—GOSHEN — A nationwide Crowdstrike outage hit home with local and regional emergency services affected by a Windows update performed early Friday morning. Local officials have been blazing ahead regardless.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company widely used by businesses and government agencies that run on Microsoft computers, said that a defect in one of its updates for computers running the Windows operating system had caused the issue, creating one of the largest global information technology outages in history.
Indiana Statewide 911 Board reported on social media around 9 a.m. that some Public Safety Answering Points in Indiana were affected and 911 call centers were switched to a backup MEVO phone system (a mobile PSAP).
“The IN911 network is a robust system with built-in redundancies and is considered a leader in 911 call delivery,” the board wrote on Facebook.
As of noon, both Goshen Municipal Airport and Elkhart Municipal Airport reported no issues in their systems, although many national and international flight centers were reporting outages.
“Big airports, they’re dependent on that software for flights and tickets and things like that,” Andy Jones, Elkhart airport manager.
Over at the 911 Call Center, Assistant Director of Elkhart County 911 Operations Todd Anderson said their system was back up and running by around 10 a.m., having outages in the early morning hours.
“We were able to get 911 calls relatively quickly to our backup phone system and then a couple of hours later we were able to get our nonemergency calls to our backup phone system,” he said. While Anderson said the outage didn’t impact response times for the dispatch center, it did change how things were done in the early morning hours.
“When your computer system’s down like that you’ve got to handwrite everything, you’ve got to look at maps. You’re not able to get a call history because of your computer being down, but it doesn’t impact response times or anything like that,” he said. “You just don’t have all the resources you normally would, criminal history, things like that. Little things like being able to create case numbers for officers things like that, we can still do it but not until computer systems come back up.”
At the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Office, Administrative Capt. Mike Culp echoed a similar sentiment.
“This focuses more on the technology and our ability to use it to serve the public for things like requests for public and history but not our law enforcement functions,” Culp said.
Earlier in the day, before news of the faulty Windows update was reported, some agencies suspected the risk of a virus.
“It was just not prompting any of our technology to do anything until we had IT look at it and confirm that there wasn’t something more nefarious going on,” Culp said. “When those kinds of things happen, we really put the breaks on and make sure that IT has a chance to come in and assess things before we start clicking buttons.”
Anderson said at the 911 center, calls were only down for a short time before they were moved to the backup system, and if they didn’t come through on their system, they rolled over to another call center.
The radios that handle dispatch were not affected.
Some local agencies as well as businesses are still suffering outages, as Crowdstrike works to correct the mistake.
“Rest assured our law enforcement functions are full speed ahead, we have been fully functional the entire time,” Culp said.
Dani Messick is the education and entertainment reporter for The Goshen News. She can be reached at dani.messick@goshennews.com or at 574-538-2065.
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