Several organizations in Santa Cruz County, including Dominican Hospital, Bay Federal Credit Union and the County of Santa Cruz, reported impacts from the global information technology outage Thursday night into Friday. While mostly minimal, the organizations said it was taking time to get back to 100% operations. 

Others, like the City of Watsonville and Santa Cruz County Bank, said they weren’t affected. 

Jason Hoppin, Santa Cruz County spokesperson, told Lookout that by the end of Friday about 85% of the county’s technology would be restored and the rest would likely be completed Monday. He added that while all offices and counters were open to the public Friday, some county staff could still be affected by the outage and not be able to process applications or provide services. 

“We do recommend that people call ahead, kind of throughout the day, to verify that their services will be available,” he said. 

Starting Thursday night, Hoppin said, county employees opened their laptops and workstations to find a blue screen and were not able to log on. 

The outage was caused by a software update released Thursday to Microsoft Windows users by a Texas cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said it “quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix.” But it was too late. Several airlines grounded all flights for a period, hospitals canceled surgeries and stores closed across the country, according to national reports. 

Allison Hendrickson, media relations manager for Dignity Health Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, said in a statement that the hospital was impacted and working to resolve the issues. 

“Like many other organizations and industries, Dignity Health Dominican Hospital and some of our clinics have been affected by the global IT outage affecting computer systems caused by a third-party software update,” she wrote. “We continue to provide safe, high-quality care to our patients and thank everyone for their patience as our teams take immediate action to restore any impacted systems. Patients will be contacted directly if their appointments are affected.” 

Hendrickson said via email she didn’t have additional details on whether or not surgeries were canceled or which services specifically were affected due to the outage. 

In South County, Watsonville Community Hospital experienced little impact from the outage, according to spokesperson Nancy Gere. 

“Thankfully the impact to Watsonville Community Hospital was minimal. Our system that allows for electronic prescriptions was temporarily down,” she wrote to Lookout. “We initiated internal downtime procedures, which meant using paper prescriptions. Systems are now back up and running.”

Bay Federal Credit Union was also affected and staff there responded “immediately,” according to Amy Ivey, chief marketing officer. 

“Our technology team worked through the night to minimize impact for our team members,” she wrote via email. “All member services, including branches, call center, ATMs, online and mobile banking, and card transactions were unaffected and we opened as usual for business this morning.” 

The outage also affected City of Santa Cruz employees and services, according to communications manager Erika Smart. She said the city expected to be operating at 100% by the end of Friday. 

“Although a solution has been identified, the remediation process is complex and will require some time to implement, and our team is working quickly to restore all operations,” she wrote to Lookout. 

City offices in Scotts Valley, Capitola and Watsonville were not affected, according to officials from those jurisdictions. 

Back at the county offices at 701 Ocean St. – in the basement – IT staff ran a makeshift hub of restoring computers that were impacted by the faulty software update. Hoppin said about 2,000 computers and laptops needed to be restored, and each can take about 3 to 10 minutes to fix. 

“The laptops are a bit more complicated because they have extra security,” he said. “We have about 50 employees across all departments working on this right now.” 

He said staff worked overnight Thursday night into Friday to start fixing the issue. Hoppin said because the county has a disaster recovery plan, it has a list of services to address first in an emergency, such as public safety. 

“We prioritize public safety, obviously,” he said. “The jail and patrol operations in the sheriff’s office are normal, and have been for quite some time. So there’s no gap in public safety services.” 

He said because of the overtime hours spent by staff working to fix the issue, there will likely be a financial impact from the outage but he didn’t have an estimate. 

Unlike when the County of Santa Cruz County experienced a cyberattack in December 2010, Hoppin said, this time around it was not a cyberattack and was not as severe. 

“That was probably more significant, because it was a denial of service attack and nobody could get online,” he said. “Our website appears to be fine.” 

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