Global cyber outage impacts local city, county and state agencies

VISALIA, Calif. (KFSN) -- The global Crowdstrike Outage has impacted a number of agencies across the state, including the South Valley.

The City of Visalia is working towards getting back up and running after 75% of its computers shut down around 10 Thursday night.

"It's always a stressful situation but obviously we wanted to make sure you look at the task at hand and I think our staff has done that. They worked around the clock to make sure our staff was up and running, they looked at the

most vital activities and they looked at the list," expressed Visalia City Mayor, Brian Poochigian.

He credits the city's fast-acting Finance and Technology Information System division.

The team first focused on computers at the Police and Fire departments.

"Emergency services were up and running, public safety was our number one priority," explained Poochigian.

"We wanted to make sure to keep people safe. So we constantly had one dispatcher working so services and calls were still going out."

Thankfully, Dispatch never went down, and by early Friday morning the city's transit system was also fully operating.

But the impact spread far beyond Visalia. Marvin Lopez runs an IT services company in Lindsay and stayed busy helping a variety of customers.

"This has been affecting everybody tremendously," explained Marvin.

"We have some people that work in the healthcare industry, everything from restaurant industries to even the 911 center in Alaska is being disrupted and lives are now at stake."

The outage is being called the largest in recent history.

Lopez says it should prompt people to always have a communication plan and prepare for emergencies.

"I think that this event has hopefully made people realize that we can't depend 100% on technology. We can't depend on a computer to do everything for us. Sometimes the old school stuff is more reliable. you know, a walkie-talkie

is not going to have as many issues as, let's say, an AI server."

While local city, county and state agencies work towards being back to normal, Marvin's IT Services can offer help to those impacted on their personal devices and local non-profit's. You can reach the company here.