Largest IT Outage in History

I wanted to provide an update to today’s widely reported internet outages. I hope the first thing we do when outages like this happen is to trust in the Lord. Our Savior is far more powerful than any of our technology and inconveniences like today’s outages are all part of His sovereign plan.

We have been closely monitoring the impacts of these outages for our clients. It is important to understand that there were two separate incidents involved in these outages. The first started yesterday, July 18 and impacted Microsoft Azure services primarily in the central time zone of the United States. Azure provides server hosting and login services for Microsoft. We monitored this and found no impact on our clients worldwide.

The second incident has had far greater impact. CrowdStrike is a security program that runs on many computers. MBS does not use this program, nor do we recommend it to our clients. This morning CrowdStrike released an update that contained a significant bug. This bug caused computers running CrowdStrike to go into an endless reboot cycle. This caused many internet services around the globe to stop working. You may have already received emails from various companies apologizing for a third-party vender causing their services to be down.

Some are calling this the greatest IT outage in history. History will have to judge that, but it will be a while before all impacted computers are remediated. To be clear, there has been no security breach and neither incident is the result of any sort of computer attack. These appear to be two isolated cases of human error.

If you have been impacted by this and need help, please know we are here to assist. For our clients, whose servers we host, please know you are not impacted by these outages as we do not use CrowdStrike, and we tightly control security releases into our infrastructure for reasons like this.

For clients whose Microsoft 365 tenants are under our management, we are currently observing no interruptions in service; however, we will maintain vigilant monitoring. Should you have any inquiries or encounter any anomalies with your services, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Outages happen and we recognize there is great trust with who you choose to host your services. We provide our own private cloud to host servers and services for our clients, like email, file storage, VoIP, domain controllers, databases, ChMS, financial software, and more. We also carefully manage any third-party venders we use and proactively evaluate any security releases before releasing them to ensure 99.999% uptime of our infrastructure.

Again, if you or any ministries you know are struggling to remediate the CrowdStrike issue, please let us know and we will do our best to assist and get them back up and running. If you would like to review your IT strategy, we are here to serve.

Thank you for letting us partner with you in ministry and please know we are praying for you this, and every weekend as you seek to proclaim the gospel.