Editor’s note: This article, originally published at 11:29 a.m. on July 19, 2024, was updated at 1:35 p.m. on July 19, 2024, to include information about the outage’s impact on the county from Assitant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard.
All Maryland courts, offices and facilities will be closed to the public Friday due to the worldwide Crowdstrike outage causing Microsoft Windows crashes, according to court officials.
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity firm based in Austin, Texas. The firm’s recent update had a defect that impacted Microsoft’s operating system causing issues for transit systems, flight delays and cancellations and disruptions at banks and hospitals around the globe Friday, USA Today reported.
While Montgomery County’s courts system has seen an impact from the outage, the county’s Assitant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard told MoCo360 Friday that the impact on the rest of the county has been “relatively limited.”
Stoddard said that the county uses a different security product for their IT system and that the county was “largely insulated from the impacts” of the global tech outage. County hospitals and medical centers have not had impacts that the public would experience and are not in an emergency or diversion status due to the outage, Stoddard said.
One issue Stoddard noted is that the county has been having issues interacting with state-level systems. The county police department has had limited to no access to policy documents because they are located on a state system, Stoddard said.
The county Department of Health and Human Services has also been having similar issues because they interface with “a number of different state eligibility programs,” he said.
On Friday court system is closed to the public but will remain open for emergency matters, according to a press release from the Maryland Judiciary office.
Proceedings in the Montgomery County Circuit Court will be rescheduled, according to social media posts from the county state’s attorney’s office.
The Maryland Judiciary office will provide updates as available, according to the press release.
As of about 12:25 p.m., Stoddard said Crowdstrike had identified the corrupted file and would likely take the rest of the day to fix the issue.
He added that at 2 p.m. Friday county officials would join a statewide emergency management call to talk through the potential impacts of the outage and see how officials across the state can help each other.
He said that county and state officials are still in the “issue identification stage” of the outage.
“I don’t expect there to be anything significant, because it’s obviously something we’re not utilizing regularly,” Stoddard said. “But the reason why we have conversations with our partners across the state is because they may realize things that are problematic sooner than we realize them, because of the varying frequency with which people use different types of systems.”
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
–Elia Griffin contributed to this report