Disconnected world: Global tech outage disruptive, even in Lodi

Jul. 20—Lodi resident Monica Gonzales flew to Dallas Thursday evening for a 24-hour business trip, hoping to be back home with family by the weekend.

However, Gonzales woke up Friday and learned her 1 p.m. (Central Daylight Time) flight back to California on Delta Airlines had been canceled.

Gonzales, like hundreds of other passengers at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, found herself scrambling to find replacement flights home.

"It's just chaos out here," she said from DFW. "I've been on hold for about an hour trying to get an airline representative on the line. I just want to get back home to Lodi and be with my family."

The cause of the flight cancellation was a global CrowdStrike software upgrade malfunction, which impacted airports, hospitals, banks, media outlets, small businesses and government offices early Friday morning.

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas, that provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.

The company handles the security of many Windows PCs and services around the world, according to CNET, which said CrowdStrike issued a statement Friday morning that it had "identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

CrowdStrike told media outlets Friday morning the outage was not the result of a hack or cyberattack, but an automatic system upgrade malfunction.

San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors chair Miguel Villapudua said the county was among the municipalities affected by the outage.

"County offices are open, and our staff is working to quickly and diligently address the issue to restore all of the county systems, prioritizing public safety and health to ensure that our law enforcement partners, the hospital, and other health clinics have the necessary tools and systems to do their life-saving work," he said.

Hilary Crowley, spokeswoman for the county, said the first three scheduled flights out of Stockton Metropolitan Airport were canceled Friday, but two Allegiant Airline flights slated to leave in the afternoon were expected to depart on time.

She said it was difficult to gauge exactly how many county departments were impacted by the outage, and what the extent was.

"It has been a systemic impact, which is being experienced differently," she said. "For example, my computer is operating the same, but my calendar is messed up, while other employees are having trouble accessing our networks with some office computers not booting up at all. Laptop users working away from the office may not be able to connect into county systems, but again, earlier this morning I was able to."

The City of Lodi and Adventist Health Lodi Memorial both reported that their systems were not impacted because they do not use CrowdStrike.

In Dallas, Gonzales said there were long lines of passengers trying to purchase tickets with airlines that weren't hit by the outage. Along with Delta, American and United airlines said they had been affected by the outage, and were working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

"Southwest Airlines wasn't impacted," Gonzales said. "I tried to book a flight with them, but tickets were $700. And everyone from the other airlines is running over to Southwest. So, I've booked another hotel room, and I'm going to wait and see what happens."

Many others in the Lodi area were affected by the outage.

Evette Holman works remotely for a Texas health care organization. She said the outage left her unable to perform her work.

"I will lose a day of pay and miss very important deadlines due to this catastrophe," Holman said.

Leslie Kurtz had a medical appointment on Friday, but said her doctor was unable to read her medical file, order prescriptions or take an insurance co-payment.

Lynn Marie said she made a trip to the San Joaquin County Recorder's office, but was told that due to the outage her document couldn't be processed.