CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A worldwide tech outage impacted many businesses and services right here in the Coastal Bend on Friday.
The problem stemmed from a U.S. cyber security company called CrowdStrike.
Disruptions continued throughout the morning and afternoon.
There was a fix, but a manual fix requiring took boots on the ground from every affected company's IT team.
Those who were impacted turned on their computers or laptops to find a "blue screen of death."
The outage impacted everything from flights, medical offices and even folks who were simply trying to pay their city water bills.
Customers went 'old school' having to show up in person to City Hall with cash in hand to pay their utility bills.
"We had to drive all the way over here to come and make the payment because everything is down, the system," resident Lupe Sanchez said.
The City took to social media Friday morning posting that the outage impacted the city's utility billing software.
That in turn impacted customer portals online and their pay-by-phone systems.
"Minimal impact but as you can see, we did have a few applications impacted, that includes our pay stations here if someone wants to pay their utility bill, our time clock system and some of our applications at development services, aside from those three, our systems are up and running," Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni.
"You can't take for granted how dependent we are on IT," he said. "The good news for the city we have a highly competent and engaged IT department, in my five years here we've had no cybersecurity compromises."
Texas DPS drivers licenses offices were forced to close.
Flight cancellations and delays were also a result across the U.S. and here at home. Morning travelers found long lines at ticket counters at at Corpus Christi International Airport.
At Christus Spohn Shoreline it was business as usual; a spokesperson said the hospital was unaffected by the tech outage.
That wasn't the case for Driscoll Children's Hospital however, which told 3NEWS they had to implement manual operations to ensure patient care.
So what is CrowdStrike?
"It's an extra layer of protection that companies use the top 100 companies use to protect their systems, desktops laptops as well as server and applications," Texas A&M University IT Director Ben Soto said.
He said the outage was not the result of a security incident or cyberattack, but rather an update that was sent out causing systems to crash.
"Just a couple of lines of code, you can see how its taken down multiple industries," he said. "We just have to be vigilant on the software side, where software developers are developing these things that can have major impacts to these systems."
For those who haven't been able to get back online, Soto said your best option is to go to Crowdstrike.com which gives instructions on the site for workarounds to get their systems back up and running.
Meantime, 3NEWS checked the City's utility portal right before news time (5 p.m. and again at 6 p.m.) Friday night and it was still down.
The City said if you still can't make a payment online you can stop by City Hall during their normal hours or local H-E-B locations.
Customers on autopay should not be affected, but should confirm with their financial institutions for any scheduled transactions.