Loyola ITS resolves issues caused by global technical outage

A global technology outage linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which is used by Microsoft Office and other major companies, affected access to Loyola’s online services, workstations and systems on July 19.

According to a mass message sent by the Information Technology Systems (ITS) Service Desk at 2:12 p.m. on July 19, production services affected by the technology outage are operational again.

According to The Associated Press, the outage not only caused Loyola to be canceled, but also delayed about 1,500 U.S. flights and nearly 4,000 flights departing from the East Coast (as of late morning on July 19). It also disrupted hospitals, banks and numerous other workplaces.

Leroy Butler, vice president of information technology and chief information officer, said the university noticed problems with some servers on the network around 3 a.m. Friday morning. He said that as staff began investigating, more information emerged indicating a global problem.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told NBC’s “Today Show” that the company inadvertently sent an update with a bug that created a problem in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Kurtz apologized for the impact the mistake caused.

Because Loyola primarily uses Microsoft, the bug affected many desktop computers, Butler said.

Butler said Crowdstrike quickly implemented a fix for the bug, but that all machines that had already received the bad update began experiencing issues. He said the team is now working on resolving the issue on those machines.

Butler said the outage affected Loyola’s network, which hosts all of the university’s servers.

“We had to go and audit all of those servers,” Butler said Friday, July 19. “There’s quite a few of them — there’s over 500 in our environment — and right now we’re about 90 percent through that process of auditing and making sure those systems are up and running.”

Butler said Friday that the network issue would likely be resolved by the end of the day, while users’ issues would be resolved once they contacted the service desk.

The process to fix the issues is largely manual, making the process quite slow, but the team is working on an automated fix, Butler said.

Since the outage, the ITS Service Desk has assisted more than 100 users who experienced a frozen blue screen, severe performance degradation of their computer or who were unable to boot their devices, Butler said.

“There is no problem in terms of university operations,” Butler said. “University operations are still functioning, maybe in some areas a little less than optimal performance in terms of computing power, but all of our administrative offices are open.”

Main image by Hunter Minné/The Phoenix