Global tech outage impacts Austin EMS services overnight [Video]

AUSTIN, Texas – An Austin-based cybersecurity firm apparently caused a global IT outage which impacted emergency services overnight in Austin.

“CrowdStrike is a, let’s call it, a very core fundamental tool that protects systems for cybersecurity,” Direct Marketing Solutions Chief Information Security Officer and cybersecurity expert David Malicoat said.

On Thursday evening, systems started having major issues.

“CrowdStrike rolled out an update and there was one file in that update that had an issue. Typically, with these updates, those systems will reboot, and they’ll come back online. In this case, what was happening is this issue was keeping that reboot from happening,” Malicoat said.

Malicoat said computers were stuck on the blue screen of death.

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The City of Austin’s internal systems were impacted. Emergency services went manual for dispatch calls. Instead of having a computer program helping decide which units or stations to send out, dispatchers were making those calls using …