White House and the Department of Homeland Security are now investigating the matter, officials say.
Emergency lines have gone down in several states due to a major Microsoft and CrowdStrike tech outage that has sparked chaos across the world.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, several 911 centers, hospitals, airports, and emergency management suffered major effects from the outage, the Oregon Department of Emergency Management told news outlets.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said he issued an emergency declaration Friday due to the outage, noting it is impacting Portland city servers, data servers, employee computers, and more systems.
Federal Agencies Responding
In the meantime, U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Friday it is working with Microsoft and CrowdStrike as well as local officials to deal with system outages worldwide.
While providing few details, the agency said its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is working with “federal, state, local and critical infrastructure partners to fully assess and address system outages.”
In a statement to news outlets on Friday, the White House’s National Security Council added that it is “looking into” the disruption, which has impacted businesses, hospitals, and airlines worldwide.
“We’re aware of the incident and are looking into the issue and impacts,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.
The White House confirmed that President Joe Biden has been briefed on the outage. He is getting continued updates throughout the day and the administration is “standing by to provide assistance as needed,” the White House said.
The head of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, posted on X that the IT issue causing the outage was identified by the security firm and that it is working on fixing the issue. The problem wasn’t caused by a cyberattack or malicious actors, he added.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he wrote on X. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”
He added, “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.”
Amid reports of widespread flight delays and problems at airports, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wrote that it is “closely monitoring” the outage impacting systems used by U.S.-based airlines.
“Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved,” the agency added Friday morning.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines are among the companies that sought ground stops for their planes amid the outage, according to an FAA tracker.
Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure said it was aware of the issue that impacted virtual machines running Windows OS and the CrowdStrike Falcon agent getting stuck in a “restarting state,” amid an ongoing global outage.
“We’re aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform. We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. On X, the company wrote it is “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion,” adding that it is now seeing a “positive trend in service availability.”
Over half of Fortune 500 companies used CrowdStrike software, the U.S. firm said in a promotional video this year. “This is a a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, Professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.