As the Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport continues to face flight disruptions due to a global IT outage, local businesses are grappling with the far-reaching effects of two separate technology failures that have impacted operations worldwide.

• Brian Schlechter, Director of IT at Bit-Wizards, a managed IT service provider in Fort Walton Beach, offered insights into the complex situation affecting the area.

“There are two outages going on at the moment,” Schlechter explained. “The first one is CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity vendor used by half of the Fortune 500 companies. They pushed an update last night that blue-screened every computer that has their software on it, which means it can’t boot up.”

The CrowdStrike issue is particularly severe, affecting both workstations and servers running Windows with the Falconer product installed. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of servers and computers that have to be manually touched because they won’t even boot up. You can’t automate it in any shape,” Schlechter emphasized.

The second outage involves Microsoft Azure and Office 365 services. “Microsoft made a back-end configuration change. I have not seen the actual change they were trying to make, but it caused issues across all the Office 365 suite of tools, even into Xbox and Xbox Live,” Schlechter noted.

While Microsoft has largely resolved their issue, some lingering effects remain. 

• “I’ve heard from people that Teams is still having some issues when it comes to meetings, especially if you’re joining meetings either from outside of your organization or bringing someone from outside of your organization into your Teams meeting,” Schlechter added.

Despite the widespread nature of these outages, Bit-Wizards hasn’t seen an increase in local service requests. “We do not use the CrowdStrike product so we have not been directly affected,” Schlechter explained. “We have had clients who are affected because they have other third-party vendors who are affected. So, they haven’t been able to log in to other websites and things like that, but nothing that we could facilitate a fix for.”

Schlechter anticipates that tourism and hospitality businesses in the Destin-Fort Walton Beach area will be most affected due to flight disruptions. “I’m expecting mostly tourists and hospitality-industry businesses to be affected due to how flights have been impacted. That’s going to have ripple effects, whether they’re directly related or not,” he said.

For businesses experiencing issues related to the CrowdStrike outage, Schlechter advises a cautious approach. “It’s simply a matter of going online, finding the instructions they have put out, and going through the manual process of fixing it and making sure you understand the changes you are making. It’s a very technical issue,” he warned.

Looking to the future, Bit-Wizards stressed the importance of preparedness. 

“Having a business continuity plan in place is so important because if a major service or tool that you are using goes down, you have a backup and your work is not disrupted,” he said. “And a business continuity plan is not just the technology behind it, but the processes that you function your business on and having a contingency plan in place as well as having as much redundancy as you can.”

Bit-Wizards is proactively supporting its clients by providing updates on both outages. “We’ve sent updates to our clients to let them know the status of both issues,” Schlechter explained. “That way they’re made aware of what’s going on and what to expect. We also let them know to please call us if they’re having issues, even if it’s just with a vendor. 

• Schlechter added that even though Bit-Wizards might not be able to fix the issue, they might be able to support them or offer an alternative solution in the meantime.

As for recovery time, Schlechter estimates it could take several days for some businesses to fully bounce back from the CrowdStrike issue. 

“For the CrowdStrike one, it’s probably going to be several days before some businesses fully recover. Like I said, it is a manual process to fix this, and some of the bigger companies have it across hundreds to even thousands of servers, and they have to touch each one manually. So, it’s just going to take them time,” he said.

He concluded by highlighting the interconnected nature of modern business operations: 

• “Even a local business is relying on larger third-party companies across the globe to help manage their operations in this day and age. Everyone here is using Microsoft in some shape or form,” he explained. “Chances are, somebody is probably using a service that is using CrowdStrike. It’s just that we’re all interconnected at a much closer rate than we used to be.”

As the situation continues to evolve, local businesses are encouraged to stay informed and consider reaching out to Bit-Wizards for assistance in developing comprehensive IT strategies and contingency plans to better weather future global technology disruptions.