Massive technology outage

A massive technology outage occurred overnight with both national and global impacts being felt this morning.

In brief, cyber security firm Crowdstrike pushed an update to systems using their security software last night and it went horribly wrong, resulted in massive service interruptions across major national industries using their products.  Airlines have virtually shut down operations globally, hospitals and medical institutions have been impacted, financial institutions are impacted and 911 services in some locations are down.

CrowdStrike has acknowledged the problem and announced that they have identified it and implemented a fix.  However, it will take time for their fix to propagate to all impacted customers and systems.  In addition, many of the industries impacted by the issue will require days to uncoil the service backlogs this incident has caused.

NWU does not rely upon Crowdstrike and, so, our systems have not been directly impacted.  That does not mean, however, that our technology partners outside the University have escaped the technology blight.  Please keep this issue in mind today as it may potentially surface as NWU staff interact with our external vendors.