The City of St. Albert was largely unaffected by the worldwide IT outage that hit banks, hospitals, airlines, and much more on Friday, although the city's internal safety and environmental reporting application was down for part of the day, the city's director of IT told the Gazette.
The outage in question was caused by a single software update gone wrong performed by multi-billion dollar cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which supplies many of the world's largest companies with software for preventing cybersecurity attacks on Windows operating systems.
READ MORE: A faulty software update causes havoc worldwide for airlines, hospitals and governments
The update caused some computers to show what's called the Blue Screen of Death, rather than turning on normally. The Blue Screen of Death is an error message that appears on Windows computers saying the computer failed to start.
Joanne Graham, the city's IT director, said that while regular city operations weren't affected by the CrowdStrike software outage, one application that staff use to make internal safety and environmental reports was unusable for part of Friday, but as of 4:45 p.m. it had been fixed.
“The situation was identified early this morning and business continuity processes were enacted immediately to mitigate the impact,” Graham said. “In lieu of online reporting, City staff completed emergent internal requests and reports via phone and email.”
“Our City operations were not affected by the IT outage.”
