The Town of Normal, the Bloomington Police Department's non-emergency lines and a couple of flights out of the Central Illinois Regional Airport are among the locally-impacted by a global software issue that disrupted the operations of thousands of Microsoft users.
NPR reports Austin-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said a routine software update experienced a malfunction. The cybersecurity's company's services are used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies. In a statement, the company said it was not a cyberattack, but rather a software glitch.
Customers using Mac and Linux operating systems were not affected, according to CrowdStrike. The company said the issue has been identified and that a fix was sent to customers.
But that wasn't before some airlines, banks and emergency services across the globe — including in Bloomington-Normal — experienced significant disruptions.
Town of Normal
A Town spokesperson said IT staff came in to work about midnight to deal with disruption to online services. Police Department and Fire Department computers had entered a reboot cycle and were displaying blue screens. Public safety workers could not log in to their computers.
The majority of users were up and running as of midday Friday, said Vasudha Gadiraju, director of innovation and technology for the town. The town website was back up and running and email service was restored, said a town spokesperson.
Some third-party systems remained affected, Gadhiraju said. And town staff have turned their attention to assisting those vendors restore their operations.
City of Bloomington
The non-emergency police department phone line was down. No direct services were disrupted but some vendors have difficulties. City payroll was inaccessible.
Central Illinois Regional Airport
A statement from CIRA said the outage affected some flights.
“Issues are being resolved. We will assist the airlines and other tenants that conduct business from CIRA by staying in touch with them and facilitating any needed communication,” said CIRA.
OSF St. Joseph Medical Center
“OSF has not been affected. We do not use Crowdstrike Security,” said a spokesperson.
Illinois State University
“Cherwell (the University’s help desk ticketing system) and the Point of Sale (POS) system at Redbird Spirit Shop. Campus IT staff continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to affected stakeholders as events warrant,” said an ISU spokesperson, who added the Cherwell outage was reported shortly after midnight and there is no estimated time for restoration.
Carle BroMenn
“Carle Health remains fully operational and able to support care. While some cloud-based third-party applications are seeing disruptions, due to our hosting infrastructure, Carle Health systems are not impacted at this time,” said a spokesperson.
Country Financial
“Country Financial is experiencing some outages with our systems. Some of our employees and reps can help clients, but this is causing longer hold times and disruptions. We apologize in advance for things taking longer than they normally would and appreciate your patience,” the company said on social media.
