Some Sacramento-area businesses close due to CrowdStrike outage

SACRAMENTO – Popular antivirus software CrowdStrike has caused worldwide outages after an automatic update was sent out. The outage has affected airlines, banks, media and businesses.

Sacramento County said some of its public offices were closed Friday, including the building permit center and the coroner’s office. Others, such as the tax collection center, were able to reopen after a few hours. Some local hospitals said they were monitoring their operations.

Broadway Sacramento closed its box office.

“We’ll probably lose half of our revenue today,” said Sally Slocum, who works in ticket sales at Broadway Sacramento.

They are closed until further notice.

“Because bad guys are constantly spreading threats, cybersecurity products need to be constantly updated to block these threats. And one of those updates is the source of this problem,” said Eset Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe.

“When we came in, we had a powwow with my team and our CEO, and we all agreed that there’s no point in opening the phone or answering the phone if all we’re going to do is say sorry, because then there’s nothing we can do,” Slocum said.

IT experts say this is not a quick fix and that this is because this particular crash requires manual reboots. A person has to personally repair each machine, which can be time-consuming for larger companies. It is unclear at this time what exactly went wrong with the update.

“It is important that businesses have cyber resilience plans and test their operations without cyber connectivity, as problems can occur in the event of a power outage, an incident, a power outage or a natural disaster,” Anscombe said.

According to Anscombe, this outage will further increase the need for businesses to have plans in place in case something like this happens in the future.

CBS13 reached out to our local hospitals. Kaiser and Dignity Health say they are experiencing some impact, but their facilities are open and treating patients.

We also spoke to a spokesperson for Sacramento International Airport, who said everything was back to normal around 7 a.m. Friday, after the FAA grounded several airlines.

But a couple who say they were taxiing in their plane to take off for their home in Virginia when the pilot cut the engine and called a ground stop have been trying to get back on a plane since Thursday night.

“We found out at five in the morning that it was the last room I think at the Wyndham. We had been to other hotels on the way, and they were all closed. They were either full or closed because of the software problem,” said Ralph Saunders.

Saunders also happens to work in the IT sector.

“I’ve been in the industry for almost 50 years. There’s no excuse for what happened,” he said.

“Everyone at CrowdStrike understands the severity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and implemented a fix so we can diligently focus on restoring customer systems as our highest priority,” CrowdStrike said in a statement.

They also indicated that this was not a cyber attack.