PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler declared a state of emergency effective 3 a.m. Friday due to the global CrowdStrike outage. The outage impacted the city's systems including emergency communications, the mayor's office said in an initial news release, but later clarified that the 911 dispatch center was still functioning.
The outage was caused by a bug in an update sent out Thursday night from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which provides cyberattack protection services for large companies and their websites. The bug caused computers running the Windows operating system to crash, and CrowdStrike's global reach meant that millions of computers were hit, crippling the operations of hundreds of companies including major banks and airlines.
"I was updated around 12 a.m., then again at 1 a.m.," Wheeler said at a news conference Friday. "I declared an emergency around 3 a.m. Friday and I directed our emergency management director to mobilize our city bureaus and agencies at the city’s emergency operations center."
The issue impacted the city's servers and data centers as well as employee computers, Wheeler's office said in a news release, as well as VPN connections and access to cloud services. Many city services rely on Microsoft operating systems, including some essential service providers, and they were all impacted.
Speaking at around 11:30 a.m., Wheeler said about 266 of the city's 487 systems had been impacted, and about half of them had been restored. Police and fire systems were the top priority, he said, with engineering staff switching to lower-priority business functions later in the day.
Wheeler's office said the overnight crashes did impact the Bureau of Emergency Communication's computer-aided dispatch system, but the operators followed contingency plans and switched to manual call-taking and paper call records, so 911 service was never interrupted. The computer system was back online by 6 a.m., according to the news release.
"Life-saving services of police and fire were not interrupted," Wheeler said. "No 911 calls were interrupted; internal systems were affected and the Bureau of Emergency Communication call takers had to work manually overnight for several hours. I want to thank them for that."
CrowdStrike said the bug was quickly detected and fixed in a subsequent update, but many systems are unable to automatically accept the update in their crashed state and will need to be manually restored by engineers at companies and governments worldwide.
Shad Ahmed, director of Portland's Bureau of Emergency Management, urged businesses to remain vigilant and not respond to unsolicited communication from unknown contacts. Federal officials are concerned that criminals could impersonate CrowdStrike employees to try to take advantage of affected businesses, he explained.
The emergency declaration helped the city mobilize resources more easily, especially in an overnight situation, Ahmed added.
In Washington County, internal communication from emergency dispatchers to sheriff's deputies was disrupted, so they switched to traditional radio communication. The dispatch computers are now back online, county officials said Friday afternoon, and the county is working to fix some other internal systems that were affected.
Significant impacts were also reported at Portland-area hospitals and at Portland International Airport, where dozens of flights have been canceled or delayed. A spokesperson for Portland General Electric said incident caused no known impact to PGE systems.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.