Multiple Minnesota agencies experience technical outages from global IT glitch

The software update that has affected air travel, banking and other industries worldwide has caused several Minnesota state services to temporarily shut down, according to state government’s IT agency, known as MNIT.

On Friday morning, business operations across the globe were interrupted due to a single bug in a software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which provides antivirus software for Microsoft users.

The state’s IT department is working with vendors to “deploy the fix provided by CrowdStrike and fully restore state agency services,” a spokesperson for MNIT said in a statement. The outage affected all state agencies in some way, the spokesperson said. 

“Public-facing impacts are different for every agency, based on outages for software applications, VPN access, phone systems and wireless networks. Agencies are working to update their websites and social media with the specific impact of this outage on their services,” the spokesperson said. 

As of Friday afternoon, the state’s Department of Public Safety website was down, causing a “server error” to appear instead of the state site. The Department of Higher Education’s website was also down as of Friday afternoon.  

Dozens of flights were canceled Friday in and out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because of the outage. 

CrowdStrike President and CEO George Kurtz in a statement said the outage was not a security or cyberattack.

“As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again,” Kurtz said on X Friday.