A massive, worldwide wave of computer outages took its toll on systems in San Diego County late Thursday, delaying flights and court operations, and forcing law enforcement and fire agencies to turn to workarounds — including pen, paper and color-coded cards — into the next day.
Blame for the mayhem fell on an update pushed out by a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. When the content hit computers running Microsoft Windows, machines started shutting down en masse. Industries the world over rely on the services of both companies, so the faulty software sowed near immediate chaos.
The system failure also translated into hours-long gridlock at the U.S.-Mexico border and briefly kept local energy utility customers from accessing their online accounts.
Problems continued hours after CrowdStrike issued a fix. The glitch extended into the evening for concertgoers at the Rady Shell, who couldn’t access their digital tickets for Friday night’s Field of Dreams Movie in Concert premiere. Ticketholders were encouraged to still attend and ask for assistance at the box office.
Many computers, including some in San Diego, had to be manually rebooted to address the problem.
“The cybersecurity problem has created a need for these types of systems, like CrowdStrike, to protect us,” said Joshua Glandorf, chief information officer at UC San Diego Health. “But that creates another vulnerability where things like this happen and entire industries are shut down.”
When the outage hit the Sheriff’s Department late Thursday, “the screens just went blue,” sheriff’s Lt. Gavin Lanning said.
During the outage — which lasted until about 4 a.m. Friday — dispatchers were able to take 911 calls but were not able to perform actions such as typing in addresses to give deputies directions. Instead, deputies and dispatchers turned to cellphones to pull up maps and such, he said. “It becomes a different way of communicating.”
“We just go back to people writing it down,” he said. “It wasn’t as easy as normal. You just go back to old school.”
The outage also led the Sheriff’s Department to limit jail bookings for a few hours while staffers used backup systems, the department said in a statement. “We were able to resolve the challenges relatively quickly,” it said.
At the San Diego Police Department, the computers dispatchers use to help relay call details to officers started shutting down around 10:30 p.m. Some screens just went black. Others lit up with a blue error screen.
Although it’s not common, dispatch computers do occasionally shut down, said Mellissa Santagata, a San Diego police dispatch administrator. When that happens, dispatchers are trained to shift to a handwritten system, using colored cards.
Details about emergency calls are written on pink cards. Non-emergency calls are written on white cards. Then runners take the handwritten notes to another group of dispatchers who relay the information to officers. Those dispatchers have their own card system to keep track of which officers are on what calls and who’s available.
“The night crew did great — they didn’t panic,” said Santagata. “We’ve been on cards before, and it’s not the ideal situation, but at least the system’s in place.”
The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department’s dispatchers took a similar approach. The system was fully operational again about 1 a.m.
Cal Fire systems were largely spared except for the patient-charting program that paramedics use during calls for service, according to Cal Fire Capt. Mike Cornette. Paramedics used paper backup charts to document medical calls and then entered the records into the computer system when the program came back online around 8 a.m.
The dispatch system for the city of San Diego’s Public Works department and the customer service call center for the Public Utilities department also went down but were up and running by midday.
At the San Diego International Airport, aircraft-tracking website Flight Aware showed 213 flights delayed by late Friday afternoon, and another 36 were canceled — far higher numbers than a typical day. American Airlines had the single largest number of cancellations, followed closely by Delta and United.
The outage most affected departing flights, airport spokesperson Nicole Hall said. An overnight curfew keeps planes from departing until 6:30 a.m., and by that time, the airport was seeing flights delayed by about an hour.
The Tijuana airport and Cross Border Xpress asked travelers to arrive hours in advance.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning.
Border-crossers at the San Ysidro pedestrian line were glued to their phones, scouring for updates during a three-hour wait. Some SENTRI users, facing 90-minute waits, said they left their cars in nearby parking lots, hoping to have better luck at the SENTRI pedestrian crossing. People at the SENTRI pedestrian line, where there is very little wait on a normal day, said they had been in line for about half an hour.
At the regular vehicle lanes, people saw waits stretch several hours, forcing many in line to call their bosses to explain they would be late. “It’s stressful,” said Álvaro Hernández, an Amazon worker who said he had been in line for about five hours. Normally, he said, he waits an hour at most in the morning.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged processing delays but said all the agency’s apps, including CBP One for asylum seekers and Global Entry for travelers, were working.
Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila said on social media platform X that while the Mexican state systems were unaffected, people should reconsider their border-crossing plans during the disruption.
UC San Diego Health and Sharp HealthCare said they were not impacted by the outage, but Kaiser Permanente sent a message to staffers Friday that it was “experiencing operational impacts related to the global CrowdStrike IT outage.”
Scripps Health, which is a CrowdStrike customer, said some of its computer systems were hit, but patient care was not affected, and the electronic health record system was working.
Emily Cox, spokesperson for San Diego Superior Court, said computers across the court system were impacted by the outage, but most courtrooms — which were the priority for the tech teams — were up and running by 10 a.m., and business offices were mostly back to normal by early afternoon.
The CrowdStrike snafu resulted in San Diego Gas & Electric’s customer portal — known as My Account — to go offline from 2 to 5 a.m. Friday. SDG&E spokesman Anthony Wagner said no customer information was compromised, and the utility’s IT system was not damaged. The My Account portal allows customers to track their energy use and pay their bills online.
Staff writers Alexandra Mendoza, Paul Sisson, Lori Weisberg and Rob Nikolewski and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
