Around 5 a.m. on Friday, July 19th, the Stockton Police Department experienced a technical glitch that affected the onboard computers in the department’s squad cars.
Police officers were unable to connect to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), which gives law enforcement access to information vital to their duty as well as a messaging system for federal, inter-state and local law enforcement.
Unbeknownst to the Stockton Police Department, computers of public servants across San Joaquin County were ceasing to work as the world began experiencing a computer outage due to faulty content pushed by the U.S tech based company Crowdstrike.
Over the weekend public services in San Joaquin County were restored according to Hilary Crowley, a deputy county administrator for San Joaquin County, told Stocktonia this week.
According to Crowley the county’s information department worked overnight last Friday to help restore services across 28 departments on a rolling basis affected by the global computer outage.
Crowley acknowledged that individual cases of computer outage caused by the faulty update are still appearing throughout the county due to workers returning to office to computers not updated since last Friday.
According to Crowdstrike, the update’s purpose was to gather telemetry on novel ways a cyber security breach might occur. Instead, the update resulted in a critical error in the computer known as the blue screen of death, rendering computers with Windows Operating System inoperable to the user until the computer is updated with a fix.
For example, staff members at the SJC Office of Education were unable to access their workstations and email services throughout the day, disrupting services provided by the Office of Education.
According to Zachary Johnson, Public Information Officer of SJC Office of Education, IT workers had to manually fix individual workstations and email services across the county to enable staff to continue work as usual.
Services at the Office of Education have been restored.
SJC Sherif’’s Department faced similar issues at the county jail in the French Camp as sheriffs had to manually book new inmates while their systems were down. Likewise, the Stockton Police Department onboard computers were disrupted for approximately three hours until each computer was rebooted.
The City of Stockton was largely spared from the global computer outage due to its limited usage of Crowdstrike software, Stockton city spokesperson Connie Cochran told Stocktonia Friday morning.
Allegiant Airlines canceled a flight to the Stockton Metropolitan Airport (SCK), offering refunds or flight rebooking to people affected by the cancellation. Airlines across the country grounded flights as a result of the computer outage.
Allegiant wrote on X that since the event it continues to face a backlog of customer comments and issues relating to its programs and services despite returning to normal operations.
Since the initial outage, both Microsoft and Crowdstrike have released manual fixes for both individual computers as well as cloud based environments. Computers and cloud based environments not online for the fix required a manual update to restore functionality.
CrowdStrike Founder and CEO George Kurtz issued an apology on the company website writing “All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority.”
Edward Lopez is serving a summer internship with Stocktonia. He is a graduate of Columbia University.