Federal government operations affected by Friday’s Microsoft outage linked to the cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike appeared to recovering their footing today, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), which reopened its offices today.
The widespread outages – affecting Federal government agencies, airlines, banks, hospitals, and other essential sectors worldwide – were caused by a defective update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software that the cyber firm pushed to Windows operating systems early Friday morning.
The incident led SSA to close its offices on Friday, the agency said on X. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also said some states’ 911 services were disrupted.
“SSA offices will open for public service on Monday, 7/22. Staff impacted by the widespread Microsoft and CrowdStrike issues are being brought back online,” SSA said in a statement on its website today. “Our phone lines remain operational and many online services at ssa.gov remain available.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is also working to get its systems back to normal. A notice on USCIS’s E-Verify website today says that “customers calling E-Verify are experiencing long wait times. The worldwide Microsoft outage is impacting phone support.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an update on Sunday that points customers to a Microsoft blog post that provides links to various remediation solutions. In the blog post, Microsoft estimates the outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices.
CrowdStrike also published an update today, which notes that the company is testing a new technique to accelerate impacted system remediation.
“We’re in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique. Customers are encouraged to follow the Tech Alerts for latest updates as they happen and they will be notified when action is needed,” the company said.
Lawmakers Want Answers
Members of Congress are looking for answers to the CrowdStrike outage – one of the largest IT outages in history – including Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.
In a post on X, Rep. Torres said he is calling on the Department of Homeland Security and its CISA component to “investigate the circumstances that led to the CrowdStrike outage.”
“Both the U.S. Congress and the public are entitled to a full accounting of what went wrong with CrowdStrike’s software and what can be done to prevent such a disruptive event from repeating itself in the future. The impacts – ranging from the grounding of flights to the shutdown of emergency response systems – are too serious to ignore, and we ignore them at our own peril,” Rep. Torres said.
The House Committee on Homeland Security also said in a Friday post on X that it is” closely following the developments of today’s global IT outage – including its border security implications.”
Additionally, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., sent a letter on Friday to the Department of Defense Acting Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers for a briefing on the impact of the outage within the Pentagon.
“A single point of failure in a cybersecurity strategy has proven time and time again to be a threat to our national security. We cannot continue to accept and allow software problems to cripple our civilian and government infrastructure—answers in this case are necessary, and a reexamination across the board of cyber-safeguards is needed moving forward,” Sen. Schmitt said in a statement.
