Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration officials say nearly all of the state’s “citizen-facing” systems are up and running following last weekend’s national meltdown caused by a defective software update sent by global cybersecurity leader CloudStrike to Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
“At this point, we can confirm that 99% of our citizen-facing systems were up by the end of the weekend,” department spokeswoman Gina Long said.
Finance Commissioner Jim Bryson said CrowdStrike had a “major impact” on the state along with companies across the country.
“We worked all through the weekend to get our servers and our individual workstations up,” Bryson said as he left a State Building Commission subcommittee meeting with state Treasurer David Lillard and Comptroller Jason Mumpower on Monday.
“We’re making a lot of progress on it. We still have a lot to do,” he said. “But we’re working on it very hard and we have a lot of people dedicated to it.”
Bryson also said CloudStrike and Microsoft have worked with the state to “help us develop ways to get people up faster.” It’s been a “very manual process,” he added.
Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security spokesman Wes Moster said Driver Services Centers had “sporadic” impacts. By Monday all centers were operating normally, he said.
Treasurer Lillard quipped that “it hasn’t affected our operations except to the extent we’ve had some screens show the ‘blue screen of death.’” But he said his IT team worked through everything with the help of F&A’s Strategic Technology Solutions office. Lillard described it as a “minor irritation the other day, but that’s all.”
“Not a disaster,” the treasurer added.
“And we haven’t gotten anybody stuck in other cities that can’t get home that I know of,” Lillard said, alluding to fellow Republicans who were hit by the outage as they sought to leave Sunday from the Republican National Convention. “We’re fortunate, just lucky is what we are.”
U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Ooltewah, was said to have shelled out $2,900 for cab fare to ferry himself and others from Milwaukee back to Southeast Tennessee.
Delta, American, United and Allegiant airlines were affected by the glitch. Southwest Airlines was not.
Mumpower said his office uses different software, so the meltdown didn’t affect his staffers.
“We for audit purposes have for years been on a different system than other state agencies,” he said.
But the comptroller is not exactly lording over other agencies’ woes.
“It’ll be us with the way this stuff goes,” he said. “Just not this time.”