The tech outage affected IT across multiple industries, wreaking havoc on airlines as they issued ground stops while the issue was resolved. Meanwhile at the MBTA service continued, but the electronic signage used to track trains and busses went down.
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The MBTA was one of many victims of the global Crowdstrike IT outage Friday morning. While trains and buses kept running, the issue made a mess of the boards T uses to communicate with its riders.
“You can’t miss the blue screen of death,” said Casey Kraft, who worried she would have a difficult time commuting to work on the MBTA.
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On Friday morning the digital monitors that would typically display announcements and train schedules instead carried the universal sign that something was wrong.
“The screens are really critical because sometimes you can’t hear the announcements so yeah, everyone stands out here glued to the train to hear those kinds of announcements so they know where to go,” she said.
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Daniel George, a software engineer who used to work for Microsoft and was visiting Boston and traveling to New York City, said what we saw Friday shows how easily our infrastructure can be crippled.
“The importance of writing really good code and how do you know even a small mistake can have a big impact,” said George.
Luckily for him and other travelers, the trains themselves were not impacted.
But those like Lee Wolff who were relying on the RMV to get their cars inspected, were out of luck.
“It’s a waiting game and it’s really frustrating,” said Lee. “I have to get it done before Saturday. Otherwise, it will cost more money and then if i get pulled over, I will have to pay the penalty.”
Gabriel Avaikian, who works at a Mobile gas state inspection station, was forced to turn customers away.
“Probably about 10 and some of them were cool about it, but some of them, they really don’t like the news.”
The transportation system across the state was impacted by a Microsoft update failure on Windows computers, run by cloud security company Crowdstrike.
The RMV has been working to restore services. Despite having to cancel appointments on Friday morning, most services were back online by the end of day, including in-person appointments, card payments online, the call center, and road tests.
MassDOT, which oversees the MBTA and the RMV, said it is the only executive branch agency that uses Crowdstrike in a significant way.
Those with appointments for commercial learner’s permits and driver’s licenses at the RMV need to be rescheduled, while still no word on when car inspections will be available.
