FedScoop reports that operational interruptions have been announced by more federal agencies in the wake of the massive global IT outage resulting from a failed CrowdStrike Falcon update.
At least 5,000 workstations at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been taken down by the incident, which a source close to the matter notes may be resolved in over a week, while the Department of Health and Human Services' public-private partnership Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network had its systems disrupted for nearly an hour due to the outage. Similar disruptions have been reported by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which estimated the incident to possibly affect over 6,000 employees. Such an outage has already prompted House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., and House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., to seek answers from CrowdStrike's CEO on how to prevent a similar incident in the future. "This incident highlights how dependent we have become on IT for every aspect of our lives, and how a single defect can have a ripple effect across the entire economy. You can bet that malicious cyber actors in China and Russia are watching and taking note on how we respond," said Green.
