By Staff Reporter |
The global IT outage that occurred Thursday night impacted Arizona’s early voting operations well into Friday.
Arizona’s three largest counties — Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal — were impacted by the outage. Together, they account for over 80 percent of the state’s population.
In Maricopa County some vote centers’ check-in systems weren’t functioning, explained an elections department spokesperson.
“The vote center equipment is connected via a network to facilitate voter check in and cast their ballots,” said the spokesperson.
Maricopa County started the day with a few vote centers open. That number grew to 14 by the afternoon.
The outage impacted Pima County’s online system to request a mail-in ballot. As a result, early voting has been limited, with election workers providing provisional ballots instead.
Pinal County early voting was restored hours after the outage.
A majority of employee computer and server technologies unrelated to election operations were also impacted across Arizona’s counties.
The outage occurred through Microsoft’s partner CrowdStrike. The Austin, Texas-based software company said in a statement that the outage wasn’t caused by a cyber attack or security incident, but rather a defect in a single content update to its “Falcon Sensor” software for Windows hosts intended to protect against hackers. Mac and Linux hosts weren’t impacted.
CrowdStrike provides antivirus software to Microsoft for Windows devices. After 16 hours, Microsoft reported that all impacted apps and services had recovered.
The secretary of state’s office clarified that voter rolls weren’t affected by the outage.
In a press release, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes reassured voters that the registration system was secure and operational. Fontes noted that the closed, air-gapped tabulation networks were unaffected, and that access has been restored fully to agency computers used for verifying petition signatures.
“The current global outage is affecting systems worldwide and is not specific to elections or Arizona,” said Fontes.
Fontes clarified that the closed, air-gapped nature of the tabulation networks means that election-support infrastructure, such as email and web servers, are on separate systems.
“[It] is important to note that vote counting was not impacted at all by this event,” said Fontes. “No significant operational delays have been identified at this time.”
Arizona’s voting operations weren’t the only ones impacted. Both government agencies and private industries were affected: airports, airlines, banks, broadcasters, emergency 911 call centers, and hospitals were all affected. Among CrowdStrike users are over half of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies.
United, American, Delta, and Allegiant airlines were grounded overnight at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Southwest Airlines was unaffected because they operate on Windows 3.1: a version over 30 years old.
Cochise County didn’t mention elections-related outages, but did report that their 911 dispatch center and sheriff’s department were impacted and required their IT team’s work. The Phoenix Police Department also experienced issues with its computerized 911 dispatch center.
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