A massive global tech outage this morning does not appear to be significantly affecting Mississippi’s critical infrastructure, with state and private entities reporting limited local consequences from one of the largest cybersecurity outages in modern history.
The tech outage has affected innumerable businesses and public systems across the world, grounded thousands of flights across the U.S. alone and even temporarily disabled 911 services in some states. Across the country, hospitals have been forced to cancel surgeries and medical visits as entire departments have ground to a halt.
But thus far, Mississippi’s civil and emergency infrastructure appears unharmed by the mass outages, with state agencies reporting no disruption to regular services following the outage. The extent to which the outages may have affected private businesses across the state is unclear, however.
At the heart of the global tech outage is Falcon Sensor, a suite of programs developed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike’s programs are widely used across civil and private infrastructure globally. In 2021, analysts estimated that nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies were CrowdStrike customers.
A “misconfigured/corrupted update” pushed to CrowdStrike customers across the world appears to have caused a staggeringly high number of computers and systems to enter a failure loop, with computers displaying the “blue screen of death” and affected systems simply not working even after being rebooted.
In many cases, affected users must personally edit the faulty update, removing the corrupted files, a hypothetically simple but manual process that, for sufficiently complex systems, could take serious effort to replace and repair.
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to multiple government agencies, businesses, infrastructure and health systems across the state. Fortunately for Mississippi, little serious disruption to critical services are occurring.
And those problems that do exist are mostly due to remote services experiencing failures. Mississippi Baptist Medical System in Jackson reported ongoing issues with some IT services, still persisting into the afternoon. Due to the complexity of the network of software underlying modern health systems, it is difficult to predict when the lingering issues may all be resolved.
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