‘Not a cyber attack’: NYC officials project calm amid CrowdStrike outage

Mayor Eric Adams and other top New York City officials sought to calm fears about the impacts of a global technology outage early Friday morning, stating that none of the city’s emergency operations or crucial services had been affected. “Our infrastructure and emergency operations – they're all in place,” said Adams, appearing with the city’s Chief Technology Officer Matt Fraser, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chair Janno Lieber, Fire Department Commissioner Laura Kavanagh and more.

The outage – which has had far-reaching impacts, grounding flights around the world, disabling access to some online banks – was caused by an attempted routine software update by the widely used cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, affecting customers on Microsoft systems. Reiterating statements from CrowdStrike early on Friday morning, New York City officials said multiple times that the outage was not a cyber attack.

Delivering assurances that the city’s emergency services and infrastructure, including the 911 system, were not experiencing any negative effects, city officials nonetheless acknowledged that New Yorkers may experience some services – such as a filing for a permit or paying a parking ticket – being temporarily offline throughout the day. “We’re moving through and we have the pathway to recover it, and we're confident that soon we'll be back to a normal operating state for the services that may feel slightly impacted,” Fraser said on Friday morning.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks added that they have been monitoring some internal issues – including some arrest processing issues and camera issues affecting the NYPD, Department of Correction and Department of Environmental Protection –  but says they won’t impact day-to-day services. “The average, 99%, of them won’t be impacted by it, and we’re relatively confident that the impact that we will have will be cleared up before it does have an operational impact on, in fact, the everyday public,” he said.

Lieber added that there hasn’t been any impact on the actual delivery of subway, bus, commuter rail and paratransit service, though countdown clocks for some of its subway lines have not been operating this morning. He added that there may not be exactly up to date information on when commuter trains are arriving either, but said that function is coming back online. “All the customer-facing impacts have already been evaluated and mitigated, and all of our systems are running,” Lieber said.

New York state Cyber Chief Colin Ahern said that the state is also working on addressing any impacts from the outage, but said there is not yet a timeline for full restoration. “Our priority is to ensure all 911 systems across New York are operational and able to address emergency response needs,” Ahern said in a statement shortly after 9 a.m. “The third party has identified a fix for the underlying issue and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services is actively working with other state agencies on a resolution.”