Several Washington state agencies were affected by Friday’s global technology disruption.
An outage at the Employment Security Department has been fixed, but the agency warned that some unemployment benefit payments might be delayed.
The Secretary of State’s Corporations & Charities Divisions suffered some technical problems, but was back online by 1 p.m. Phone, chat and in-person services were expected to resume on Monday. The outage did not delay the mailing of primary election ballots, which were mostly mailed by local election offices before the disruption.
The problem was related to a Thursday software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to computers running Microsoft Windows. The computer issues widely impacted hospitals, airlines, government agencies and businesses.
“CrowdStrike said the issue with the update has been identified and a fix has been sent to customers. This is a software issue and is not related to a cyberattack. State agencies in Washington are using the new software fix provided by CrowdStrike and restoring impacted computer systems,” said a news release from Washington Technology Solutions, which handles information technology for the state government.
Thousands of flights were delayed or canceled out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Washington hospitals and clinics reported computer problems, and closed some clinics and non-emergency operations.
