NORFOLK, Va. — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said critical health and safety systems are operational across the state while airlines and government administrative functions are being affected by a global technology outage Friday.
"Our IT teams have been working through the night and have been making progress to restore access to government administrative functions. As of this morning, some delays remain, and we will continue to work to address those," Governor Youngkin announced on Saturday morning.
The outage stems from a software bug included in an update that cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike sent out to Windows machines early Friday morning, the Associated Press reported.
On Friday afternoon Governor Younkin said in a statement, "the Commonwealth is continuing to work on ongoing tech outages. Due to reported instances of nefarious phishing amidst this outage, please do not click on any emails from an unknown source," Governor Youngkin said Friday afternoon.
It grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.
“There are flights getting cancelled everywhere. People aren’t being able to access their bank accounts," said Associate Professor Adwait Nadkarni, Director of William & Mary’s Cybersecurity Center. “There has to be better ways of dealing with this, of rolling back updates."
Nadkarni said while the outage could have been worse, it still left people scrambling. He said there isn’t much everyday people can do to prevent these kinds of situations.
“What we really need to do is lobby governments to really focus on making these worldwide software supply chains more robust," he said.
Gov. Youngkin said 911 call systems and transportation infrastructure across the state were operational Friday, but airlines and flights across the Commonwealth are being significantly impacted. The governor also said that "government administrative functions" are affected and that Virginians are likely to experience delays.
“Amidst the global tech outages, overnight we have conducted an initial assessment to determine impacts across government agencies and departments for functionality,” said Gov. Youngkin in a statement around 9:30 a.m.
Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles was one example of that. Many of the department's 76 Customer Service Centers across the state experienced system outages, but all were back online by about 3:30 p.m. Friday. Online DMV transactions were also back up and processing by mid-afternoon.
In Virginia Beach, the sheriff's office said their inmate telephone system was offline for a period of time Friday and inmates were not able to make or receive calls.
Youngkin said his team is coordinating with authorities on the local, regional and federal level about these issues, as well as with private sector critical infrastructure partners.
He encouraged Virginians to be patient as they find and put solutions in place.