Texas A&M University-College Station posted on X that all classes scheduled for Friday, July 19, would be canceled, citing "vendor IT outages." However, all university campuses remain open, and operations are running regularly.
"This outage was caused by a faulty update to the application and causes Windows computers to enter a reboot loop. This was not caused by a cyber attack, but rather a technical issue with the vendor," university officials said in a statement.
Texas A&M Information Technology department sent an alert Friday morning that CrowdStrike, the Austin-based company tied to the outage, "pushed an update to their security platforms that has negatively affected all Texas A&M University environment Windows-based OS systems operating with the cyber company. The devices impacted include a range of devices, including TAMU servers, workstations, and work laptops.
University officials are also encouraging students, faculty, and staff members with university-issued Windows devices that show a blue screen to bring their devices to their local IT support team on campus to be manually restored as soon as possible.
As of Friday morning, other public education institutions, including the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Houston, have not reported issues because of the outages.
This story is developing and may be updated.
©2024 the Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.