ROCK SPRINGS – A software glitch caused havoc worldwide Friday and Sweetwater County was not immune to its impacts.

The Associated Press reports a faulty update provided by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike resulted in disruptions worldwide. The defect was found to impact Windows systems, sparing Mac and Linux systems. The issue resulted in computers running Windows to be locked into a dreaded “blue screen of death” error message when the computer attempts to reboot after attempting to install the update. A fixes to the issue have been applied throughout the day.

While the Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport itself wasn’t impacted heavily by the system glitch, Airport Director Devon Brubaker said United Airlines, which operates out of the airport, was severely impacted like other major airlines. 

“It’s been a day,” he said.

He said the Friday morning departure was canceled and the midday flight delayed by several hours as United worked to accommodate passengers during the outage. At one point, Brubaker said United had only one working computer employees were using to rebook flights. Employees were also using hand-written baggage tags for passenger luggage. Brubaker said the timing was particularly challenging for United.

“Our flights are quite full because of the (National High School Finals Rodeo) and summer activities,” he said.

He said both the team at the airport and the customers all dealt with the situation as best they could, with Brubaker complementing both groups for how they handled the inconveniences created by the glitch.

He said the airport itself was largely unaffected by the glitch. Brubaker also said the normal air service will return soon.

“We’re anticipating the industry as a whole will be back to normal by tomorrow morning,” he said.

At Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County, the error didn’t impact it as much as other area businesses, but it resulted in an all-nighter for the hospital’s information technology team. 

“The poor IT department, those guys worked throughout the night,” Deb Sutton, the hospital’s marketing director and public information officer said.

The department started with the emergency department and expanded into other departments. She said about 50% of the hospital’s work stations were impacted by the bug, saying the hospital’s CERNER records system was down for about an hour. As of this afternoon, the IT department was working on bringing the computers back online. She said the hospital switched to its downtime protocol, which requires employees to utilize paper notes until the computers are back online. She also praised the IT department as it had set up computers in the hospital’s computer lab for use in case there was a need for computer access as they worked.

The Sweetwater County Combined Communications Joint Dispatch Center and 911 services in the county were not impacted by the outage.

“We do not use CrowdStrike, so we weren’t affected,” IT Director David Halter said.

He said several state agencies were impacted by the bug, having heard from other IT professionals throughout the state.