DENVER — A global IT outage disrupted organizations around the world on Friday, including several government agencies across Colorado.
Coloradans attempting to use many online government services were greeted by error messages Friday morning informing them that services were not available.
The Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles said most of its services were affected, including online DMV services, MV Express Kiosks, driver license and I.D. card services at state and county offices, county motor vehicle office services, and DMV call centers.
The City and County of Denver said it was experiencing “minimal issues” related to the global outage and said all of its DMV branches were closed Friday.
The Denver Office of Clerk and Recorder said a database people use to access public records was offline Friday.
There was no timeframe for when all services would be restored.
“We don't know the exact count of the computers that have been affected by this but we assume it's probably in the hundreds of thousands or millions of computers,” said Steve Beaty, a cybersecurity expert and chair of the computer sciences department at Metropolitan State University in Denver.
Beaty said government offices that rely on CrowdStrike are just as vulnerable as any other organization that relies on it.
“What happened is that there's a piece of anti-malware antivirus software from a very well-known and well-respected company called CrowdStrike. They push what we call an update, and that update then broke a lot of computers,” said Beaty.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) closed all of its local offices Friday due to the outage and warned callers to expect longer wait times. The SSA said offices will be open on Monday.
Beaty said it could take a while to get everything back up and running at full speed.
“I think it's gonna take days,” Beaty said. “The IT folks are going to be doing a whole lot of walking around and doing the fix manually.”
He said while it’s not as devastating as a cyberattack, it still comes with a cost.
“It’s going to cost probably millions of dollars to clean up this particular thing just out of people's time,” said Beaty. “But their computers have not been compromised, the data have not been stolen.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it's working with federal, state and local agencies to assess the impact of the outage on their offices and to help them take steps to fix it. CrowdStrike also said it’s working with customers.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” the company said in a statement.
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