How an international IT outage is affecting Middle GA governments, hospitals, & other entities

Several government agencies, hospitals, stores and gas stations across Middle Georgia were disrupted by an international IT outage Friday.

Some operations were shut down or slightly impacted after an error with a software update from Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike interacted with Microsoft Windows, according to George Kurtz, the IT firm’s president and CEO.

“This is not a security incident or cyber attack,” Kurtz said in an X post at 5:45 a.m. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

The outages’ effect around Bibb, Peach, Houston counties

Macon-Bibb County government was slightly affected, but the issue was resolved, according to Chris Floore, the county’s chief communications officer.

The outage temporarily shut down an “internal cloud,” from the county court system, but “there wasn’t a public-facing aspect of it,” Floore told The Telegraph.

“Right now, IT is still kind of going through everything and double checking, just to make sure, but we have not really seen any public impact on the consolidating government side,” Floore told The Telegraph.

An aspect of the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office was also slightly impacted, according to Sgt. Christopher Williams, the office’s public information officer.

“The outage has had an affect with our (Georgia Crime Information Center) database but this has not ceased the functionality of our daily operations here at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office,” Williams said.

The Warner Robins local government has “not been impacted at all by the outage,” Mandy Stella, the city’s public information officer said.

However, the issue prevented data on medical emergencies in Warner Robins and Perry from being relayed to the state for several hours, according to Eden Tomberlin, communications manager of Houston Healthcare system.

“According to our chief information officer, the Georgia Emergency Medical Services Information System appears to have been the only application impacted,” Tomberlin said. “The outage prevented data transmission from our Emergency Medical Services to the state for approximately seven hours.”

Servers within other local entities were shut down including Georgia departments of Driver Services, Revenue, Human Services and the Bibb County Tax Office.

Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security said on X around 11 a.m. it was “working with our partners to restore full functionality.”

CVS Pharmacy and Circle K cannot take digital or card payments, and are only accepting cash.

The Middle Georgia Regional Airport was not affected by any tech issues, according to Floore.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.