Just after midnight on July 19, staff at the Gloucester County 911 Communications Center were met with an immediate and widespread systems outage to computer aided dispatch and records software (CAD), as well as the paging/alerting system for fire and EMS crews.
The crash was directly attributed to the global network interruption caused by faulty security detection software used by CrowdStrike and affected Microsoft Windows 11 systems.
County Information Technology (IT) staffers were alerted and immediately began to assist and troubleshoot. An all-call to off-duty dispatch personnel was made and additional dispatch positions were quickly staffed to help IT staff with old-fashioned “pen and paper” call taking, records keeping and resource tracking.
The county’s Emergency Operations Center was immediately activated, with notice of the disruption made to its coordinators in each of its 24 municipalities. The county fire coordinator directly communicated with all fire departments to have both volunteer and career firefighters monitor radio transmissions through the early-morning hours, since paging and alerting platforms were nonfunctional.
Radio communications to police remained unaffected while EMS crews also maintained heightened awareness. All incoming 911 calls – as well as portable radio communications between first responders in the field – remained fully functional.
