Morning outages disrupt St. Joseph services, area travelers

By Cameron Montemayor

From St. Joseph to Kansas City and across the globe, widespread disruptions from significant IT outages impacted everything from airlines and public transit to businesses and emergency services.

The disruptions were the result of a failed software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and its compatibility with computer systems that use the popular Microsoft Windows operating system.

St. Joseph city officials were alerted in the early morning hours Friday by the St. Joseph Police Department about nationwide technology disruptions that wreaked havoc on businesses, airlines, banks and health care systems across the world.

“Our disruption more is we have a very hectic schedule. And, you know, we put all of that aside to make sure those other services are a priority and get them operational,” said Mary Robertson, St. Joseph communications and community engagement director.  

While the St. Joseph Police Department was not affected, other areas like St. Joseph Transit saw their systems go down Friday morning, preventing them from routing buses for a few hours. The server was restored before 11 a.m. and bus routes returned to normal by Friday afternoon. 

The St. Joseph Health Department was not as fortunate to have its state-tied services back as fast. 

“We do have two services WIC (Women, Infant and Children) and the clinic services that are affected. Our own computers locally are not affected, but at the state, the state health department is affected and we are tied to their systems. So when they’re down, basically we’re down as well,” Robertson said.   

Buchanan County EMS officials said their systems were largely spared from any significant disruptions Friday.

“Really we have just kind of deployed our technology staff to the health department to do that troubleshooting, we’re monitoring that and when the state gets that encryption back up, then we’ll be able to resume those duties as well,” Robertson said. 

Mosaic Life Care did not respond to a request for comment on whether hospital systems were impacted by the outage. 

A little more than 30 minutes south of St. Joseph at Kansas City International Airport, New York native and Air Force veteran Dez Starkes was preparing for a Delta Airlines flight to meet with longtime friends from his days in the service when he noticed things starting to go wrong. 

“I got to the airport around 4:15 in the morning, got through TSA as we should, around 5:50 or 6 o’clock they told us that we’re going have a three-hour delay, that systems are going offline,” Starkes said. “I had a suspicion something was going wrong as I saw the kiosk kind of go blank. It was kind of stuck in recovery mode.”

Across the country, more than 2,600 flights were canceled on Friday. While Starkes’ delay hasn’t ruined his trip entirely, it certainly put a dent in it. 

“The three-hour delay was pretty impactful for me just because it pushed out some of my plans and now the friends I’ve come to see in Kansas City, we had a small window for us to meet, so now we can’t see each other and that is an issue,” he said. 

While most services in the St. Joseph area returned to normal or were starting to get back online, nationwide, struggles from the outage are continuing with seemingly no end in sight.