Unprecedented Cyber Outage Paralyzes Maricopa and Pinal County

The CrowdStrike tech outage that triggered nationwide crashes of Microsoft Windows computers reached Pinal County and City of Maricopa offices today, officials reported.

Pinal County spokesperson James Daniels confirmed, “It affected employee laptops, computers, and servers. It hit about two-thirds of the computers we have, we believe.”

City spokesperson Monica Williams mentioned that the city’s SmartGov portal, used for submitting permitting documents, was also impacted. “It has been down intermittently throughout the day,” Williams noted. “Staff are monitoring the situation, so it appears to only be affecting that one service.”

Daniels revealed the crash was discovered around midnight and “people have been working on it since the early hours of the morning.” Essential services like elections remain unaffected by the outage, he added.

County Recorder Dana Lewis issued a statement explaining that while election systems were not impacted due to their isolation, other county PCs, including those in the Recorder’s office, were affected. “We are working diligently to revert the change and restore functionality to these systems. The AVID systems were not affected and there are currently no significant community service impacts,” Lewis stated.

Lewis noted that because the outage occurred on a Friday, the impact is lessened compared to busier days of the working week.

This national outage impacted various sectors including government agencies, airlines, emergency dispatchers, and hospitals. The root cause was a faulty software update from Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike, intended to enhance user protection against hackers.

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