Some locals affected by outage

Jul. 19—CUMBERLAND — Gov. Wes Moore's administration worked with officials across the state Friday to address a global technology outage involving CrowdStrike software and Microsoft operating systems.

"We are closely monitoring outages at major medical systems and state agencies," he said via press release. "I want to assure the public that leadership across the state routinely conducts thorough exercises to prepare for an emergency like this one. We are already seeing many impacted systems come back online, and we will continue to provide guidance, coordination, resources, and support to our partners until this issue is fully resolved."

Maryland state transportation and systems at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport were working as intended, but specific airlines might have been affected by the incident, Moore said.

"Our 911 networks and first responder systems have remained resilient, and we continue to monitor all systems to ensure they are running at full capacity," he said. "And after conducting a full review of all state systems, I am confident we know the issues that need our attention, and we will work continually until all systems are back to normal operations."

All Maryland courts, offices, and facilities were closed to the public Friday but open for emergency matters.

Local responsesA UPMC spokesperson on Friday said the hospital system was impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, which affected less than 10% of its Microsoft Windows-based devices at some facilities.

"UPMC's IT team intervened early to mitigate the problem and is restoring servers and PCs," the spokesperson said. "Patient care has not been affected and our facilities are operational. Our emergency departments are open and appointments and procedures will proceed as scheduled."

Brandon Vance, IT site manager for Garrett Regional Medical Center and Potomac Valley Hospital said, "WVU Medicine is not a CrowdStrike client, so we were not directly impacted. However, some of our cloud vendors were impacted. This has, in turn, impacted some non-clinical systems within WVU Medicine."

Kendra Thayer, chief nursing officer for the health systems said the tech issues resulting from the outage "had no impact on patient care."

According to the Allegany County Government IT department, the outage impact was limited because the county uses "a hybrid environment" with 12 computers and one server. No customer services were interrupted, and two computers needed to be repaired as of about noon Friday.

"At this point Garrett County (government) has not been affected by the internet outage," Administrator Kevin Null said Friday morning.

Cumberland Administrator Jeff Silka said the city was not impacted by the outage "as we do not use CloudStrike as our cybersecurity software."

Frostburg Administrator Elizabeth Stahlman said the Microsoft issue did not affect city operations "as none of the city/police software is Microsoft-based other than the standard Windows/Microsoft office software."

The Allegany County Health Department said via social media it was "temporarily unable to provide birth and death certificates" due to the outage.

Teresa McMinn is a reporter for the Cumberland Times-News. She can be reached at 304-639-2371 or tmcminn@times-news.com.