‘Hug your IT folks’: The CrowdStrike outage turned technicians into heroes

It was 3 a.m. Friday when Tyson Morris got a wake-up call that would send him into crisis mode for days. Atlanta’s trains and buses were expected to be running in two hours, but all systems were down, showing the dreaded “blue screen of death.”

“It’s the one phone call a chief information officer never wants to get,” said Morris, CIO for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. “I jumped out of bed, and my wife was wondering what was going on. She thought someone had died.”