Gov. Kim Reynolds today announced that some state government systems and employee devices have been impacted by a global outage caused by an automatic software update from CrowdStrike, which the state uses for malware and virus protection.
The Iowa Department of Management’s Division of Information Technology operates a 24/7 security operations center. At approximately 12:30 a.m. today, the security center identified the CrowdStrike error, and a temporary fix was applied at 1:04 a.m. At approximately 1:30 a.m., a formal fix from CrowdStrike was issued. The quick action by the security team limited the initial impact of the outage to approximately 1,400 servers and 3,300 workstations, or less than 20 percent of all devices across executive branch departments.
IT staff are working now to restore all systems and devices and will continue to do so around the clock. It’s anticipated that systems will be fully restored over the weekend.
In the meantime, Iowans should be aware that some system outages could temporarily impact them today. Additional updates will be provided as necessary.