Massive teach outage leaves many wondering what caused the issue

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KBSI) – Near and far people affected by the widespread technology outage, hospitals, airports, banks, restaurants  and everything in-between being impacted by the issue.

Andy Leighton is from Southeast Missouri, he shares his experience trying to get from Nashville to Dallas. He says it’s been a stressful day watching his flight get pushed back, and other travelers dealing with the mess.

“I missed my connection in Dallas, Dallas forthwith is a gigantic airport way bigger than I imagined,” says Leighton.

Around the world, it’s not just people, but city systems affected by this outage, in Cape Girardeau, Jason Selzer an engineer with the city of Cape describes what happened at city hall.

“Last night the it technician over at the police department was notified of the outage he came in and started immediately working on it and was able to coordinate a resolution and started installing all of that” says Selzer.

As for the safety of public information in Cape Girardeau, Nicolette Brennan says that public information of Cape Girardeau citizens was kept in safe hands.

“It can be inconvenient it can be aggravating and when it comes to our data anymore it can be aggravating because so much of our personal information is out there says Brennan. Going further Brennan says, “thankfully citizen data was in a 3rd party service that was just untouched by this process and those crevices remained in tact throughout the duration of this event.”

From here at home to around the world it seems no one was spared by the cyber issue, we talked to a local cyber security expert who weighted in on the situation and the severity of it.

“This is perhaps the largest catastrophe of a digital cyber event that ever occurred” says author Robin Cole.

Back to the city Cole says a tech called falcon was updated by Crowdstike and that’s what caused the damage saying “it caused unfortunate events that we all know as the blue screens of death.” Cole then says, “each computer running falcon froze and could not be caused to run by any means other than a cold restart reboot of the computer.”

As for how many interictal parts of the world was affected by this cyber issue, Cole says it’s hard to tell at this point, but it appears to be one of the largest in history saying. “Emergency centers shutting down we don’t have any idea yet how extensive and what critical digital electronic systems went into blue screen of death out of no where without warning but it’s going to become apparent.”

As for what’s next Cole says its not possible to know saying “that’s not possible to predict when will it happen again, I think we can get past ‘if’ it will happen again it’s just a matter of time but you can’t predict you have to plan and have alternatives in place so that when the next one happens your not locked in one place totally not resilient.”