Dear Oakland Community,
Late Thursday evening, the City of Oakland was affected by a global computer outage prompted by a defective system update pushed out by the City’s cybersecurity software vendor, CrowdStrike. This was not the result of any attack or malicious activity. CrowdStrike is widely used in industries including airlines, banking, and government and unfortunately impacts have been reported worldwide. Here in Oakland, the primary impact has been to our employees’ computers, and we are well into the process of resolving those impacts.
At the time of the outage, our 911 call-takers continued to take your emergency calls and route them to emergency responders. Our 911 call lines remained open throughout this incident. Public safety computer systems have now largely been restored and both our police and fire departments are nearing full operations. We thank our emergency response team and the IT staff who prioritized this work. Please continue to report emergencies by dialing 9-1-1.
We are continuing this morning to evaluate all the impacts of this computer systems outage. In-person services and programs will continue today, including our summer meals programs and other activities. Online systems remain functional so you can continue to report crimes, pay or contest parking tickets, report illegal dumping to OAK311, apply for permits, and more, through www.oaklandca.gov. Staff at our service counters are working to report any computer issues they are experiencing and will do their best to help you, but we thank you for your patience as they are implementing work-around solutions and working with our IT team to restore their computers.
We will provide additional updates as we make progress to resolve this issue and continue to provide you with quality public services.
In thanks and service,
Your City of Oakland Team