ST. GEORGE — While a global internet outage caused by a faulty software update Friday impacted flights, hospitals, media outlets, banks, small businesses and government offices, it appears to have had little impact on services in Washington County.
“I asked our IT people about it this morning and was told it’s business as usual,” Washington County Commission Chair Gil Almquist told St. George News.
While he didn’t go into specifics, Almquist said Washington County has invested in keeping the bulk of its services and systems “in house” and independent, rather than outsourcing them to third parties.
“This morning we were fully open and operational,” he said.
The county’s combined 911 emergency dispatch service was also unaffected by the internet outage, Almquist added.
The trouble began with a faulty software update implemented by cybersecurity firm Cloudstrike that impacted customers running Microsoft Windows, according to a statement from the company. Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted and the outage was not the result of a cyberattack.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” the Cloudstrike statement reads. “… We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.”
While the outage has impacted numerous sectors across the public and private sectors that use Microsoft 365 apps, it does not appear to have disrupted state services in Utah, according to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Gov. Spencer Cox.
“No state IT platforms have been impacted by the CrowdStrike outage this morning,” Cox wrote Friday morning. “We will continue to monitor the situation.”
The city of St. George did experience some issues this morning related to the outage, but they were fixed in short order by the city’s IT department, city spokesman David Cordero said.
“No services like energy, water or power were effected,” he said.
It was the same story at the St. George Regional Airport as interim Airport Manager Dustin Warren said systems were down for around 30 minutes yet “had no impact whatsoever” on airport operations.
This was not the case for airlines, however, as thousands of flights were canceled and left tens of thousands of people stuck in airports worldwide due to being locked out of check-in and booking services.
Almquist noted his own ire over this issue as his daughter had gotten stuck in Minnesota while on her way to Iceland.
While multiple healthcare systems were also impacted, Intermountain Health was largely spared, spokesman Lance Madigan said, and shared a statement from the healthcare system on the matter.
“Intermountain Health has experienced limited, indirect impact due to the CrowdStrike outage affecting computer systems around the world,” the statement reads. “While no Intermountain systems are affected, some vendor provided services use CrowdStrike and they are being delayed. Thus far, we have seen minimal impact to patient care. CrowdStrike has provided a patch, but it has to be applied manually. That is expected to be completed within 24 hours.”
Internet-based banking and credit union services were impacted regardless of location, and include Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo and Capital One among others.
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