Austin Company’s Global Tech Outage Leaves TRS “Limping a Little Bit”

Today’s global tech outage left TRS “operational but limping a little bit,” TRS Executive Director Brian Guthrie said at the start of this morning’s TRS board meeting.

• Note: The faulty software update — that sparked global chaos with airline, bank and other disruptions — was pushed out overnight by the Austin-based CrowdStrike cybersecurity firm.

The Good News
Guthrie said the good news is that most of the retirement system’s 180 servers that were affected have already been patched.

And, all front facing core member services are operational, the investment operations are running smoothly — and the retirement system’s trading partners, such as State Street, were not affected, Guthrie added.

Essentially “Bricked”
More problematic, Guthrie said, were the individual work stations — including his own — that happened to be open at the time that CrowdStrike distributed the faulty update. These work stations were essentially “bricked” and will need to be manually attended to, Guthrie said.

What Guthrie described as “triage stations” have been set up at the main TRS headquarters in downtown Austin and at the TRS Alpha Building in the Mueller Complex to get the work stations up and running on a prioritized basis. “Once we get into the machines, and physically touch them, we can get them repaired,” Guthrie said.

That process should be finished later today or by tomorrow (Saturday) at the latest, Guthrie said.