Local fliers were turned away from Augusta Regional Airport on Friday, July 19, just as those preparing to travel around the world as a software glitch shut down airports globally.
According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the outage was not caused by hackers, but was a glitch in a computer software update and only affected its customers running Microsoft Windows, the world’s most popular operating system for personal computers.
Augusta Regional Airport released a statement and has a message on its website advising ticket holders to contact their carrier directly for further information.
CrowdStrike released a recording on its customer service line stating that the problem was related to “the Falcon sensor,” referring to one of its products used to prevent cyber attacks. The company has 29,000 customers, mostly in the government sectors and health care.
Local hospitals have not reported any problems or outages.
“We’ve been getting calls all day from worried patients, but we haven’t had any problems,” a representative from Wellstar MCG Health said.
According to Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson, the city of Augusta has not experienced any issues and Columbia County Manager Scott Johnson said the same, adding “I’ve been working on my computer all day.”
However, some small business workers that use the CrowdStrike system came to work at 8 a.m. and were greeted with a blue error screen.
Caleb Spalding, of Computer Exchange, says that his company does not use CrowdStrike products and that the timing of automatic update was unfortunate.
“Normally you would never schedule a major update on a Friday morning, instead you wait until the workday is over or late at night so that gives you plenty of time to fix any problems,” Spalding said.
According to Spalding, users of Microsoft products should go ahead and allow for any updates if prompted to do so by the company.
“This was an automatic update, so if you get a prompt from Microsoft, go ahead and allow it to update,” Spalding said.
CrowdStrike has not speculated a timeline for when the errors will be fixed.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
