CHENANGO COUNTY – Friday morning, a Microsoft outage impacted computer systems worldwide. In the United States, 911 services are down across the country and major airlines like Delta, United and American have grounded planes and delayed flights. In Chenango County, county offices were forced to close for the day as IT professionals work diligently to rectify the situation.

The outages were caused in part by a software update for Microsoft Windows operating systems sent out by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. In a post on X from CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, the company said the outages were caused by “a defect found in a single content update of its Microsoft Windows operating systems.” The company said the outage is not related to a cybersecurity breach and that a fix is on the way.

Chenango County was not untouched by the mass outage. Computers left on overnight Thursday in the county offices automatically updated and were unable to be turned on Friday morning. Therefore, offices were forced to close as IT professionals work on fixing the computers.