INDIANAPOLIS — A single Microsoft content update is responsible for a global tech outage impacting Hoosiers and businesses like gas stations hotels, banks, some grocery stores and more.
Systems were down at many businesses — meaning they were only able to accept cash.
As of late Friday afternoon, many companies were beginning to come back online.
"When you go and you restart everything, you've got to think about the process of which you bring back tens of hundreds of thousands of servers to make sure they all come back in the same way," said John Boomershine, VP of Security & Compliance with BlackInk IT in Indianapolis.
Boomershine said companies perform system updates all the time.
"Those updates happen throughout the day and into the evening, and it's one of those updates that triggered this event. It appears that they erroneously identified a file that was a legitimate file as being a virus or something bad. They clamped onto it and that crashed systems," Boomershine said.
Companies like the BMV and AES Indiana came back online late Friday. AES told customers who were unable to make a payment due to the outage that they will not be penalized.
"We understand how dependent we are on technology. So business owners should begin to understand that it's no longer a matter of if something's going to happen but when," Boomershine said.
Boomershine said it is also important for businesses to prepare themselves for that day.
"We need to take systems that are fragile and make them anti-fragile or be able to say, 'if I can't serve you electronically, how do I do it manually or with paper?'" said Boomershine.
An investigation into the CrowdStrike global outage may better help find out how this all happened.