Adams County Courthouse closed Friday as world deals with global technology outage affecting airlines, banks, hospitals

A global technology outage has grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world.

The Associated Press reported Friday morning that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack — and that a fix was on the way. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

Hours after the problem was first detected, the disarray continued — and escalated.

Pat Frazier, a deputy chief with the Adams County Sheriff’s Department, says the Adams County Courthouse has been closed for Friday. However, Adams County 911 remains operational, and the Adams County Jail is open and staffed today.

“With the computers not running right now, all courthouse business will be affected today,” Frazier said. “It’s an IT issue, some kind of a download affected that product that is not allowing the computers to run until they’re fixed or updated this morning.

“The guys (from the sheriff’s department) out on the street have a computer. They’re getting dispatched via a computer. 911 is running, but any other computer that has Microsoft will have to have the download put on.”

Jessica Douglas, director of the Adams County 911 Center, said her department was affected but remained functional during the overnight hours.

“We did have a number of our PCs that were not able to run our computer-aided dispatch system,” she said. “We were down to about two stations. We normally have five. We were still able to perform critical functions with our computers. Now, had we not had our computers, we would have still been functional, but we would have been pen and paper. Our 911 phone lines and our radio infrastructure were not affected at all.”

Adams County Clerk Ryan Niekamp sent a press release Friday informing local media that the Adams County Ambulance is online and functioning, but the Adams County Health Department has limited services today.

“No clinical services will be available,” Niekamp said. “Call ahead to determine if the needs can be met before you come in person.”

Steve Felde, external and internal communication coordinator for Blessing Health, said the CrowdStrike issue is affecting Blessing Hospital but patient care is not impacted. The impact is mostly on non-clinical systems including desktop computers.

Rick Noble, chief medical officer at Quincy Medical Group, said all QMG location are open, and doctors are seeing patients.

“Patient care is not compromised at present,” he said.

Quincy Mayor Mike Troup said none of the city’s computers have been affected. He added that Quincy Regional Airport was operating Friday morning.

Adam Yates, chief of the Quincy Police Department, said he received a note from Douglas early this morning that the dispatching system went down. However, he said it was operational by about 4:30 a.m.

“I’m not aware of any (of the police department’s) computer systems being affected,” Yates said. “There’s nothing internally that I’m aware of that’s not OK. Everything is working like it should. I’ve not heard anything from our city IT department. I’ve not heard anything from the officers that things aren’t working like they’re supposed to.”

Kyle Beckman, director of marketing at First Bankers Trust, said the bank’s three facilities in Quincy are unaffected.

“We experiencing a little bit of a delay in some third-party systems,” he said. “In general, we’re pretty fortunate that it’s all systems go for our customers. We’re able to do for all of our customers everything they would expect.”

Bridget Browning, chief information officer at Homebank, said the outage has not affected customers at its nine locations — two in Quincy and seven in Missouri.

“All of our overnight processing went OK, and internet banking is up and running just fine at each branch,” she said. “The tellers can still transact business and help our customers, even if we were to go offline.

“Now, internally, when 80 percent of your PCs go down, that seriously impacts your staff. Our IT guys got a fix around 7:45 (this morning) and immediately started dispersing to different branches and doing manual fixes on each PC. That just takes time.”

Browning said all of the computers have “fixed” at Homebank’s 12th Street location in Quincy and its Hannibal and Palmyra facilities.

Ericka Snider, marketing director for State Street Bank, said the facility at 801 State is not affected by the outage.

The Associated Press reported long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at a time when many travelers are heading away on summer vacations. News outlets in Australia — where telecommunications were severely affected — were pushed off air for hours. Hospitals and doctor’s offices had problems with their appointment systems, while banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages to their payment system or websites and apps.