Global software glitch affected Edmonton police 9-1-1 calls overnight Friday

Global tech outage affects Edmonton 911 A software update that sparked a worldwide technology snafu affected Edmonton police's 911 calls Friday. Nicole Weisberg has more.

Faulty software used by several significant organizations globally — including government agencies, hospitals, airlines and businesses, among others — afflicted Edmonton's police and fire departments, the city's police said Friday.

The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) said the global outage — caused by a faulty cybersecurity software update — affected its Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, call-handling system, which includes 9-1-1 calls.

"There were no other systems within the service or in the emergency communication centreer that was impacted," Ron Anderson, the chief innovation and technology officer for EPS, told media on Friday.

Police said late Thursday night its emergency communications centre experienced "a highly unusual issue with phone connectivity" starting at 11:30 p.m., resulting in dropped calls, and that the problem was resolved at 4 a.m.

The global technology outage caused by the automatic software update pushed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected customers running Microsoft Windows. It was not the result of hacking or a cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologized and said a fix was on the way.

Businesses and governments worldwide experienced hours-long disruptions — their computer monitors glowing blue with error messages — and scrambled to deal with the fallout.

Anderson said despite the disruption taking 9-1-1 calls, police were able to continue operations at their dispatch centre, taking 146 calls — "a relatively normal call volume for Thursday night, at this time of year," he said — during the outage.

"We had a fair number of (dispatch stations) go down, but we were able to continue operations, and we still were able to see the calls coming into the queue," Anderson said.

"We actually had staff calling back the numbers that displayed on the queue there, so we didn't lose anything. We did have a larger than usual number of people waiting online and some dropping off, but we called every single one of those numbers so that we could ensure there was nothing missed along the way."

With files from Associated Press