ANNAPOLIS, MD — Governor Wes Moore this morning received a full briefing on the global technology outage involving CrowdStrike software and Microsoft operating systems and its impact on State government operations. As of this afternoon, the State of Maryland has made significant system restoration progress and continues to actively address and monitor impacts.
"Our administration continues to tackle this emergency with the utmost coordination, responsiveness, focus, and speed,"
said Gov. Moore. "We are grateful for the strong and ongoing partnership of county and local governments, critical private and nonprofit operations, and all key stakeholders affected by this global incident. And we appreciate the cooperation and patience of Marylanders as we work together to fully address outages that remain unresolved."
The widely-reported incident is linked to an update for the Falcon Sensor product in the latest version of Microsoft’s CrowdStrike platform. At about 3 a.m., Maryland received confirmation of a nationwide information technology outage issue affecting Windows servers and workstations. The issue is not related to a security incident, but to a faulty software update pushed out through the company. CrowdStrike is pushing out another automatic update to address the flaw, but manual patching is necessary in some cases.
While the global incident impacted systems across Maryland, most State agencies reported minimal disruption, with brief outages or bluescreens that have since been restored.
The Maryland Department of Emergency Management is leading the statewide coordination effort to respond to the incident. This morning, the department raised its State Activation Level to “Partial” and the State Emergency Operations Center continues to be activated.
The Maryland Department of Information Technology is working closely with State agency partners to push out a workaround from the vendor to repair systems that are unable to receive the automatic fix. The department is also working closely with both CrowdStrike and Microsoft to restore affected services to State agencies.
The Maryland Department of Health, contractors, and health care partners are experiencing varying degrees of technical issues related to the incident. Outages continue to impact some department-operated facilities, including the Division of Vital Records and local vital records offices. The department continues to closely monitor outages at major medical systems in coordination with the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems.
The Maryland Department of Transportation reported that several airlines operating out of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport were impacted by the incident. Flights are operating as airlines work to fully resume operations. Travelers are advised to confirm flight status with their airline prior to arriving at the airport and to expect delays. Maryland EZPass users may experience longer than normal wait and processing times for toll transactions. Other department services and operations have not been impacted by the incident.
The Department of Information Technology and the Maryland Security Operations Center continue to monitor the situation. The State of Maryland remains committed to providing guidance, coordination, resources, and support to our partners until the issue is fully resolved.