CrowdStrike outage impacts Houston businesses, government entities

Houstonians impacted by global tech outage

First Houston had power outages, now the city is dealing with global technology outages. FOX 26's Jade Flury spoke with upset Houstonians who weren't able to go to the DPS.

HOUSTON - First, Houston was hit by power outages. Now, the city is being hit by a global technology outage. The outage is impacting banks, airlines, and many companies across the country and in Houston.

Crowdstrike said the tech outage is not because of a cyberattack. Tech experts said the outages were due to a software update gone wrong. The faulty update from cybersecurity platform is causing problems for millions of Microsoft users.

"These types of updates happen all the time. But this one had a bug that affected all the Microsoft operating systems, servers, and computers," said Juan Guevara Torrez, a technology expert.

The tech outage forced the FAA to issue a ground stop for major airlines at Houston airports.

"They should have had a plan B for when something like this happens, when the computers are down. You’ve got to have that paper ticket, so they should have sent them to everybody," said one passenger flying out of the airport.

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The outage caused Harris Health Systems to cancel outpatient appointments and Texas DPS driver’s license offices to close for the day.

"Oh god, I need this license. I got to go back to college," said a woman trying to get her license at the DPS.

Many people are frustrated after taking off work to be met with a sign in front of the DPS saying "closed, system down."

"It was a surprise because I made an appointment on the 29th, and I was hoping it would be ready by then," said another person at the DPS office. "I have a teen who just lost his license."

The Department of Homeland Security said they’re working with Crowdstrike, Microsoft, and federal infrastructure partners to address the system outages.

"What concerns me is the fact that they released an update that had a bug in it. Right now, it shut down the systems, but what happens if that bug opens up vulnerability to other things," said Guevara Torrez.

Crowdstrike said a fix for the issues has been deployed.