Today, some Microsoft users around the world encountered a sudden computer glitch that ground their systems to a halt.
Hospitals, airlines, banks, and more all reported the dreaded “blue screen of death”.
The glitch was caused by a routine software update malfunction by CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company.
The Northwoods weren’t spared the impacts of this historic outage.
The City of Wakefield posted on Facebook that the outage was impacting their ability to process tax or utility payments and look up account information.
Morning flights at the Rhinelander-Oneida County Airport were delayed by around 40 minutes.
Matthew Leitner is the director of the airport.
“From what I understand the local station staff, and I have to extend our gratitude and accolades, they were able to find a manual work-around,” he said.
Their first afternoon flights were delayed by about an hour and a half due to the outage, but the other two flights were on time.
A representative from Associated Bank, which has branches across the Northwoods, said that they too were impacted by the global outage.
They said in an email to WXPR that impacts were “isolated to a few systems supporting specialty products, not mobile banking, online banking, or credit and debit cards”.
The vast majority of their customers weren’t impacted.