The worldwide technology outage that struck banks, airlines, hospitals and other businesses overnight Thursday affected some organizations in Cambridge, including local banks and the police department.
Cambridge Police superintendent Pauline Wells, in charge of operations, said the outage began just seconds after midnight Friday and “affected most of the computers on our network,” including those in cruisers. The department’s report writing and computer-aided dispatch systems were affected, she said. Service was restored by 4 a.m., Wells said. The effect on response to 911 calls was “minimal” because the 911 center “was still receiving calls and dispatching via the Motorola radio system.”
Several local banks posted statements on their websites saying there could be processing delays or other disruptions. Cambridge Savings Bank said “some deposit transactions, including payroll, may be delayed in posting to your account” and Leader Bank said its “EBusiness” service wasn’t available, advising customers to call their local branch. East Cambridge Savings Bank warned of “temporary disruptions” and Cambridge Trust said transaction processing could be delayed.
The Cambridge Health Alliance said in a Facebook post that “CHA was not affected by this outage and all systems and operations are running normally.” Spokesperson David Cecere added a slight disclaimer, saying that “we are having some issues with our retail pharmacies which may lead to delays.”
Beth Israel Lahey Health, the system that includes Mount Auburn Hospital, said “locations are open and providing patient care” but added that “our teams are working to resolve the impacts of a global technology outage and there may be delays.”
As for Cambridge city government, the city’s technology department said impact was minimal, according to Lee Gianetti, director of strategic planning and communications. “Like many organizations we are just experiencing minor impacts with some of the desktop computers and some Microsoft software. The outage is not impacting any of our major enterprise applications that would impact public services,” Gianetti said. There were some delays in posting materials to the city website.
The outage was caused by a software update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that serves organizations around the world. The update resulted in systems running on the Microsoft operating system crashing, according to news reports.
Wells said CrowdStrike’s fix recommended to the Cambridge police department was “unfortunately” manual, requiring staff to log into computers and remove a specific system file from the CrowdStrike folder, then restart the computer. The computers in police cruisers had to be updated individually, she said.
“This heavily slows down the rate of repairs we can make across the organization, given the number of computers/servers to track down,” she said.
While officers couldn’t use the computerized record-keeping system, they wrote reports on paper and submitted them electronically once the system was operating, “to keep proper recording of all incidents in Cambridge,” Wells said.
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