CrowdStrike outage causes local issues

As a result of the global CrowdStrike outage that struck on July 19, multiple major offices, departments and establishments within Red Oak were faced with a handful of minor inconveniences.
Montgomery County Sheriff Jon Spunaugle attested to this, stating the Montgomery County Law Enforcement Center’s system went completely down.
“On our end, up in the front office and as far as patrol guys would go, we lost our RMS would go, we lost our RMS system,” he said. “This is our record management system. Basically, we couldn’t do a whole lot, because we couldn’t get into the computers to do anything.”
Spunaugle continued, saying that if an arrest had taken place, a complaint affidavit either needed to be completed by hand or done at a later time. However, he said he does not think any situation as this took place when the outage occurred.
“Back in the jail, if somebody was to come through, we didn’t have the ability to book them in,” he said. “All that stuff just had to be put on hold until we could get it done.”
In order to continue carrying out business, Spunaugle said that dispatch had to go “old school” and write all information from calls by hand. Then, this information would be entered into the system once the computers were up and running again.
“This was a big computer outage,” he said. “ Of course, it went worldwide … but it’s like anything else. We have phone troubles once in a while. We have glitches in the computers. We just make things work and go with it. Just go with the flow and do what you can as best you can.”
One final comment Spunaugle made is that some data may have been lost, specifically the data that was entered when the outage first occurred. However, he said the center will not know for sure until IT takes a closer look.
“It’s like anything else [that] goes wrong around here, we just work through it,” he said.
Jackie Laire, Communication Supervisor of the Montgomery County Law Enforcement Center, agreed with Spunaugle by stating though the outage was an inconvenience, services were not affected. After all, the center still had access to the “old school” backup system.
“It [the outage] did not keep us from functioning and doing what we needed to do when the calls came in,” Laire said on behalf of dispatch.
Though the Crowdstrike outage did not have a major impact on the center’s ability to function, Laire said it gave employees a little more work.
“It not only affected us here in the communication room, [but] our officers … have mobile data terminals in their vehicles, and those were all down also,” she said.
Though the data terminals were down, Laire said the officers were still able to patrol the roads and conduct their ordinary work. As she mentioned previously, the center always has a backup plan.
As a contracted IT Director for Montgomery County, Beau Boeye of Boeye Tech and Design has been kept in the loop about all updates regarding the outage. He emphasized Spunaugle’s points by affirming that the Law Enforcement Center was greatly impacted.
“In [an] attempt to better protect elections and county governments, the State of Iowa provides us access to the Crowdstrike platform,” he said. “With the recent outage, our Law Enforcement Center was affected the most due to compounding issues with our virtual environment and the failed CrowdStrike update.”
Boeye said that in Red Oak, multiple servers as well as workstations in county departments were impacted. For example, Zoom was down on July 23 during the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors meeting. As a result, residents were unable to tune in virtually.
“To my understanding, a flawed update pushed by CrowdStrike to all of their customers is what caused the issue,” he said. “There were numerous IT departments throughout the state that were online at 1:00 a.m. Friday morning working to resolve the issues for their counties.”
Though the CrowdStrike outage caused a variety of inconveniences, Boeye said that the network of local IT directors who looked into the issue collaborated well together to find a resolution. Then, just as quickly as the outage began, servers and machines were back online.
“Essentially, the deletion of recent files pushed by the agent’s updater resolved the issue,” he said. “Around 8:30 a.m. that Friday morning, a new patch was pushed out by CrowdStrike, which resolved the issue for devices that hadn’t yet received the most recent flawed update.”
Boeye mentioned that although this outage posed many challenges, he and his colleagues received insight regarding potential improvements to be made within the IT environment.
Though many hospitals around the globe were greatly impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, CEO Ron Kloewer of the Montgomery County Memorial Hospital said it affected the local hospital very little. He said that the outage had no effect on patient care and did not impact anything significant. Similarly, Red Oak City Hall did not have any information to report regarding the outage.
Along with hospitals, many airports around the globe were impacted tremendously. Kevin McGew, Manager of the Red Oak Municipal Airport, said that though the local airport was not affected, the Harlan Municipal Airport in Shelby County was.
Final comments about the outage were given by Kevin Herrick, Technology Director for the Red Oak School District. He said that CrowdStrike runs on two of the district’s servers. However, only one was affected, and it was back up in two hours.
“The server that was affected was a file server, so we didn’t have any services technically go down,” he said. “It was just a server that stores things for us. So, our network wasn’t down, or any type of security wasn’t down. It was just that one single, standalone server.”
According to Herrick, the district’s third-party services provider was able to get the server quickly restored, and no employees were faced with technology issues as a result of the outage.
No further information regarding the CrowdStrike outage was released. Most of the offices, departments and establishments that were affected are now up and running like usual.