HELENA — The ripple effects of the nationwide CrowdStrike outage Friday morning were wide-ranging – and they also reached some state and local government agencies in Montana.
In general, agencies MTN spoke to Friday said they didn’t have major impacts from the outage, but they kept a close eye on the situation throughout the day.
One state agency that did report issues was the Montana Department of Justice.
“The Department’s IT division worked quickly to find a solution and has kept the impact to the public minimal,” a DOJ spokesperson said Friday afternoon. “At this time, all DOJ servers and most computers are back up and running.”
Notably, some Motor Vehicle Division services were interrupted, but DOJ leaders said all the customers affected had their appointments rescheduled or were otherwise accommodated. They said there were no known security breaches to the department’s network.
The city of Helena reported its city-county IT department was monitoring systems Friday, but that they only saw minor impacts on a few of their cloud service providers.
The Helena-Lewis and Clark County 911 Center posted on Facebook Friday that their operations remained unaffected by the outage.
Kelly Lynch, executive director of the Montana League of Cities and Towns, told MTN Friday morning that she hadn’t heard about any of her members dealing with significant issues from the outage.
Across the country, airports saw some of the most notable disruptions. At the Helena Regional Airport, director Jeff Wadekamper said, because of the timing of their flights, they hadn’t experienced any direct impacts when airlines dealt with system issues Friday morning. However, he said it appeared cascading effects from larger airports were leading to some delays later in the day.
