MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A worldwide software outage is affecting systems in the City of Memphis Friday morning, including the Memphis Police Department (MPD), a spokesperson said.
As of 1 p.m., airlines have resumed operations at Memphis International Airport after the software issue led to global technology disruptions, communications issues, and flight delays. MEM leaders said though operations have resumed, schedules could continue to be affected throughout the day. Passengers should check their flights before heading to the airport.
The issue is impacting MPD and other first responder systems, according to city. An MPD spokesperson released the following statement:
Some MPD systems are affected, but it’s not impacting our ability to police. Our radios are still working. We are still answering calls. And officers are being dispatched to calls for service. It is not impacting our ability to take care of our citizens.
The Memphis Fire Department also said their systems are affected, but it’s not impacting their ability to operate and firefighters are still responding to emergency calls as normal.
The city's spokesperson said their tech team has found solutions and are working to return full capacity to all critical systems. The team is expecting to have those solutions implemented soon on Friday.
The Shelby County Sheriff's Office has not reported any issues. A spokesperson for the Shelby County Mayor's Office said they may be experiencing some connection issues, but IT workers are making sure services are available.
The computer glitches started late Thursday night, affecting businesses across the world. In an interview with the TODAY Show, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz explained the outage was caused by a software bug included in an update that went out to Windows machines. It caused many Windows computers to not be able to boot up, or to be stuck on a blue screen.
CrowdStrike sent out a fix for the error, but computers may still take time to restart and return to service.