Loyola ITS Resolves Issues Caused By Global Tech Outage

A global technology outage linked to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — used by Microsoft Office and other large corporations — affected access to Loyola online services, workstations and systems July 19.

The production services affected by the technology outage have been resolved, according to a 2:12 p.m. mass text sent by the information technology systems (ITS) service desk July 19.

Beyond Loyola, the outage caused about 1,500 U.S. flights to be canceled and nearly 4,000 delayed as of late morning July 19 on the east coast as well as disruptances in hospitals, banks and numerous other places of work, according to The Associated Press. 

Leroy Butler, vice president of information technology and chief information officer, said the university noticed some servers within the network were having issues around 3 a.m. Friday morning. He said as staff began to investigate, more news came out indicating a global issue.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on NBC’s “Today Show” the company unintentionally sent an update with a bug that caused a problem to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Kurtz apologized for the impact caused by the mistake. 

Since Loyola primarily uses Microsoft, the bug affected many desktop computers, Butler said. 

Butler said Crowdstrike quickly deployed a solution to the bug, but any machines that already received the bad update began having issues. He said the team is now working on resolving the issue on those machines.

The outage affected Loyola’s network which hosts all servers for the university, according to Butler. 

‘We had to go and check every one of those servers,” Butler said Friday, July 19. “There’s quite a few of them — there’s over 500 in our environment —  and right now we’re about 90% through that process of checking and making sure that those systems are up and running.”

Butler said Friday the issue with the network would most likely be resolved by the day’s end while user issues will be solved as users contact the service desk. 

The process to resolve the issues is mostly manual, making it somewhat slow, but the team is working to create an automated solution, Butler said. 

Since the outage, the ITS Service Desk has helped over 100 users who experienced a frozen blue screen, severe degradation in the performance of their computer or an inability to launch their machines, Butler said.

“There’s no issue in terms of the university operations,” Butler said. “University operations are still functioning, maybe in some areas a little bit less than optimal performance in terms of the computing power, but all of our administrative offices are open.”

Featured image by Hunter Minné/The Phoenix