Worldwide tech outage affecting local government and flight services
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) – A tech outage affecting businesses, banks, and governmental agencies worldwide is also affecting local law enforcement.
The Colorado Springs Police Department is on "priority alert" this morning, following difficulty with their dispatch operations. For now, they're asking anyone who needs police, but isn't in the middle of an emergency, to file a report online.
"We trained for these situations. This is our job to serve our community with whatever tools are at our disposal," Ira Cronin, spokesperson for CSPD said.
CSPD says that the computer system failures began at approximately 10:30 PM on Thursday, July 18, 2024. 9-1-1 phone lines and department radios were not affected, and patrols and police response to emergencies remained in place across the city. Just before midnight, the Communications Center switched to Priority Dispatch and Accident Alert Status to ensure they were able to respond to emergencies while also focusing on resolving the system outages.
Colorado State Patrol told KRDO something similar, but said they're dispatch problems should only affect their documentation, and that they're still operating as normal.
Most services in Pueblo are also disrupted like police, DMV, and local government. The City of Pueblo communications center went down at 12:30 a.m. last night and came back online at 8:15 Friday morning. Sheriff David Lucero said public safety was not impacted by the outage. The Pueblo Board of County Commissioners office closed down on Friday due to the outage.
As of 1:15 p.m. CSPD and CSFD are back to normal operations.
The Colorado Springs Airport also experienced issues. Six flights were delayed and two were canceled altogether.
"This is, obviously, a little bit different than what we've experienced before," Dana Schield, spokesperson for the Colorado Springs Airport said. Schield added more flights could be delayed later on Friday as reverb from the morning delays.
The outage also caused the Starbucks app and tech systems to go down today. An employee at a Colorado Springs location said they couldn't enter anything on their computers and had to write down orders instead.
