CrowdStrike outage continues to cause chaos for NYC as 40K computers still need fix
Some 40,000 New York City computers were down on Tuesday, days after a global “blue screen of death” outage – as the depth of the crisis slowly comes into focus.
Officials admitted hundreds of thousands more devices were affected by CrowdStrike’s corrupted software update than had initially reported after dodging The Post’s questions for days.
The city conceded the total number of devices affected ballooned from 90,000 to 300,000 over the weekend as the IT officials worked to uncover the full effects of the error — but officials remained tightlipped about what services have been affected by the mishap.
Mayor Eric Adams blamed the faulty numbers given out by his administration on the “tedious” process to identify affected devices.
The process, which requires IT staffers to start the computers in safe mode, delete the corrupted program and then reboot, can take anywhere from two minutes to a half-hour, sources said.
New York City CTO Matthew Fraser told reporters Tuesday the number of affected devices “skyrocketed” after IT workers included computers and servers in their analysis.
“The nature of the way this propagated, it was hard for us to assess specifically what the number was,” Fraser said.
Fraser said IT workers had to assess each device individually to know if it had been affected rather than apply an automated solution across all machines.
“Part of the steps to remediate this required us to touch physically, or in some cases virtually, the machines themselves and go through a process to bring those things back online,” Fraser said.
Fraser estimated the city won’t be able to fix all of the broken devices until the end of the week.
“We have a long road ahead of us,” Fraser said.
The CTO said the remediation could be hurried along by an automated fix recently introduced by CrowdStrike, but he doesn’t want to take software solutions from the embattled tech company at “face value.”
“We have to test it in a lab to make sure it works before we push it into our environment and cause any other issues,” Fraser said.
While the city continues to struggle with tens of thousands of offline devices, officials have to pick and choose what city services can remain operational, Fraser said.
“In that process we’ve kept all critical services online and we’ve prioritized the things that are most essential to city operations,” Fraser said.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry from The Post about which city agencies were most affected by the 40,000 devices still down.
Adams pointed out that the city’s emergency operations, such as 911, were never offline during the ongoing crisis.
“We didn’t even feel what other municipalities felt,” Adams told a room full of reporters at his weekly briefing Tuesday.
The global outage that caused worldwide chaos among airlines, banks, hospitals and governments was sparked by a faulty software update sent by CrowdStrike Friday.
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that makes some of the software installed on Microsoft computers.
The outage hit 8.5 million devices worldwide or less than 1% of all Windows devices, according to Microsoft.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz choked up as he warned Friday it could be “some time” before the situation is completely remediated.
A congressional panel sent Kurtz a letter requesting the CEO testify about the “the largest IT outage in history,” according to the Washington Post.
Shares for CrowdStrike have plummeted, dropping another 13% on Monday after falling 11% on Friday.
