BEAUMONT, Texas — Some of Southeast Texas' first responders felt the effects overnight of a global technology outage that affected companies and services around the world.
By about midnight the effects were being felt at the Beaumont Fire Department, according to Captain Waylon Evan.
The issues at the fire department started at its downtown headquarters as one after another computer went down. Then, since all of their systems are tied to each other, all 12 stations around the city lost their computers. The department relies heavily on computer systems to dispatch and keep track of their calls.
The outage, which affected the fire department for two to three hours, did not affect phone and radio communications. The department was still able to dispatch stations to calls for service around the city.
However, the outage did force them to manually log all their calls into a logbook using a pen, according to firefighter James Nall.
While the outage made it difficult, firefighters just went back to the old fashioned manual methods to log their calls and were able to stay on track and get their jobs done, Nall told 12News early Friday morning.
Once the computers came back up they transferred all of the call logs into the system.
On the law enforcement side officials at both the Beaumont Police Department and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office reported that they continued to function throughout the outage.
A check of Southeast Texas Hospitals showed that all were still operating.
The outage grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.
"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted," the company said in a statement. "This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."
The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and escalating disruptions continued hours after the software company said it was gradually fixing it.
In an interview with the TODAY Show, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz explained that the outage was caused by a software bug included in an update that went out to Windows machines. Kurtz said the issue was identified quickly and a fix was sent out, bringing some computers back online quickly.
This is a developing story. We will update with more if and when we receive more confirmed information.
- Reports from the Associated Press contributed to this story.