By Jorge Casuso

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include the outage's impacts on the Police Department and Santa Monica Collage (SMC).

July 19, 2024 -- The CrowdStrike outage that triggered global chaos Friday morning has impacted some of the City of Santa Monica's online services, City officials said.

However, the City's emergency services have not been affected by the IT outages that caused thousands of flights to be canceled and stalled systems in sectors including banking, healthcare and government.

"The City of Santa Monica is experiencing impacts from the global technology outage and some online services may be affected," said City spokesperson Tati Simonian.

"There are no security concerns and emergency services are not impacted," Simonian said. "We appreciate your understanding as we work to restore services."

Police officials said that at around 10 p.m. Thursday night, several of the Department's internal systems -- "none of them vital" -- were affected by shutdowns.

"This primarily included some of our report-writing workstations, our vehicle computers, and our jail’s booking system," said Lt. Erika Aklufi, the Police Department spokesperson.

"Our partners in the City’s Internal Services Division worked diligently to get them back online by 6:30 a.m.," Aklufi said.

"We already have workarounds in place for all these systems and were able to utilize them to cover during the gap in service."

At Santa Monica College (SMC) -- the city's biggest employer -- the outage has had "minimal to no impact" on operations since the school does not use CrowdStrike directly, the school's top IT official said.

"However, we are currently investigating whether any of our interfaces or third-party vendors" are affected, said Calvin Madlock, SMC's Chief Director of Information Technology.

These vendors include Terra Dotta International Student Services, Microsoft 365, the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) and Banner Financial Aid, Madlock said.

On Friday, the government news website Statescoop reported that many state and city government services across the country have been disrupted by the faulty Crowdstrike update that sparked the outage.

The disruptions resulted in "knocking administrative systems offline and delaying the delivery of some services," the site reported.

The report added that "the delivery of services at motor vehicle offices across the country have been delayed or completely interrupted."

Crowdstrike -- a cybersecurity firm that provides cloud workload protection and uses AI to detect and block threats -- said the outage was caused by a software issue and not a cyberattack.

The company said it has identified the problem and deployed a fix that can get systems back on-line immediately, although it could take longer.

In an interview with CNBC, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that for some users, rebooting the system may not be enough and that it could take hours or "a bit longer" before their systems are back up.

For those who are experiencing issues after rebooting, CrowdStrike recommends taking the following steps:

1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment (putting the host on a wired network and not on Wi-Fi can help).

2. Navigate to the %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

3.Locate the file matching "C-00000291*.sys" and delete it.

4. Boot the host normally.