A massive Microsoft outage on Friday shut down airports, a hospital or two, a smattering of diesel pumps across the nation, and nearly half of state permitting office websites in a major blow to the country's infrastructure.
The outage, caused by a faulty update from CrowdStrike, a widely used cybersecurity firm, impacted the Microsoft Windows operating systems favored for government work. CrowdStrike said the outage was not a cyberattack.
"The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed," CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement. "We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on."
Overdrive called a handful of truck stops on Friday morning to check on diesel fuel availability, and one reported outages in accepting card payments overnight, although mostly the pumps had come back online by dawn.
Inquiries to Pilot Flying J and TA-Petro have yet to be returned, but Love's said it "is not currently seeing an impact to customers at our stores related to the global outage overnight."
The outage's most serious impact on trucking appeared to hit oversize haulers or anyone seeking permits.
A major permitting company said that state permitting websites were down or intermittent in the following states: Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, South Dakota, Arizona, Arkansas, New York, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
"The states haven’t advised us in any way, shape or form," the permitting company said. "When the websites are down for any other reasons they usually say you just have to wait."
Even as the fixes get applied and networks return online, the company expects it will take some time for the information to filter down to the right people in every state.
Caught in the middle of the news story, and incidentally a few others, owner-operators Lee and Lisa Schmitt, well known for petitioning FMCSA for an HOS exemption and instrumental in the launch of the CDL Drivers Unlimited group, got caught at the state line with an oversize load.
The Schmitts' truck hauling an oversize load, caught between a rock and a hard place as state permitting websites fall to the massive outage.Trucking Across America With the Schmitts
"The load we’re hauling is a big electrical control house, 18’6" wide" and picked up in Wisconsin and headed for Wyoming, said Lisa.
Originally, the pair hit a roadblock with the other massive news story of the moment. "At first the permit wasn’t going to be allowed because of the Republican National Convention" happening now in Milwaukee.
Only allowed to drive three hours in the state because of curfews, the Schmitts eventually did make it through Wisconsin only to have to stop at a diner just over the Iowa state line.
"Out of Wisconsin we cross over into Iowa with a police escort," Lisa said. "Well, there’s nowhere to park at the state line, so we drove three miles into Iowa, though we technically didn't have our Iowa permit. We had to get out of Wisconsin. Now Iowa tells us we didn't have a permit, but where the hell would you like us to park?"
Oversized hauling can be "a calamity of errors, every state has different laws," as Lisa put it. She's now wrangling county permits and a patchwork of down websites, certain to blow their scheduled appointment time through no fault of their own.
The Schmitts' permitting company confirmed the state website outages had brought oversize loads nearly to a standstill.
The great irony of it all is that the Schmitts are hauling the oversize load for a Microsoft AI project in Wyoming.
"The public doesn’t understand how threaded trucking is into our lives," she concluded.
[Related: Big loads, big equipment, big pay: Heavy/specialized hauling]
