Northeast State professor blames worldwide outage on human error [Video]

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — Friday saw a whirlwind of technological issues on a global scale after an update issued by the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike wreaked havoc on operating systems worldwide.

The outage affected banks, airports and multiple companies.

Flights delayed at Tri-Cities Airport amid global outage

James Holbrook is the department chair of the Computer Information Technology Department at Northeast State Community College. Holbrook said the outage was caused by human error.

“One of the biggest problems that is a recurring problem is patch management, or sometimes a lack thereof,” Holbrook said. “I really wish I had a nickel for every time that I got a bad patch that caused more problems than it would have fixed, and I would have to back out of the update.”

Holbrook said Crowdstrike’s update was likely pushed out with an error in the code, causing more errors than it intended to fix. He told News Channel 11 that in some instances, outages like the one that occurred Friday can …