911 systems, airlines, experience worldwide outage

Last week, emergency systems here in Alaska were disrupted as a result of a faulty software update from U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The outage affected emergency call lines Alaska, Oregon, and Arizona.

Problems began to emerge on Thursday night as call centers across the state for many 911 emergency lines stopped working correctly because of “a nationwide technology-related outage,” the Alaska State Troopers said on social media.

Some dispatch centers lost use of their digital call systems and had to switch to analog phones or rely on other dispatch centers to provide assistance to callers in need. AST said that the outage was fully resolved early Friday morning.

The software update glitch also affected government services and businesses across the country Friday, including banks, airlines and hospitals.

The outages were not limited to the United States, as In Germany, some hospitals canceled non-emergency operations, the London Stock Exchange’s news service stopped working, and in France and Australia, live television broadcasts were knocked offline. Sky News, a major U.K. news channel, was also disrupted Friday morning.

The outage also impacted both Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC) and Fairbanks International Airport (FAI) with operational disruptions, with some flights having been delayed or canceled. For the latest flight information, travelers are urged to contact their airline directly.

A statement from CrowdStrike said the outage was caused by a defect in a content update to its “Falcon" cybersecurity defense software for Windows hosts.

“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.”

Computers with Mac and Linux operating systems were not impacted, and CrowdStrike said the incident was not caused by a cyberattack.

The company said the issue has been identified and that a fix was sent to customers, publishing a workaround that involves booting a Windows machine in a recovery environment, deleting a single file in the CrowdStrike directory, and restarting.