Tech Newsletter: September 2024 Employee Edition

Just before midnight on Thursday, 18th July, a group of IS staff began receiving alerts indicating that many DePaul servers and workstations (later estimated to be nearly 2,000) were down. They immediately jumped on a Teams call to triage the issue, quickly learning that the cause was a defective update published by CrowdStrike, our anti-malware/EDR vendor. The update affected a CrowdStrike Windows driver, so the result was the dreaded "blue screen of death" bug check, and it typically occurred only a few seconds after an affected machine started up.

The incident response team worked through the night to remotely fix most of the affected servers before the start of the workday on Friday. A remote fix for desktops and laptops was deemed unlikely, so communications to the university community were drafted and a procedure for an in-person fix was quickly developed and refined. The incident team solicited volunteers from across Information Services and received a tremendous response, with more than 50 IS staff members and many student employees pitching in to respond to incidents, assist at walk-up locations, and fan out across both campuses to proactively repair affected machines, including over the weekend.

After what some media outlets have called "the largest IT outage in history,” university servers, computers, and workstations are largely recovered from the blue screen. Thank you for your understanding during these times when unexpected technology challenges arise. As always, feel free to reach out to the Help Desk or Genius Squad​ with any computer concerns.​

Information Services is continually working to improve and modernize services and find new ways to communicate the systems, services, and applications available to the DePaul community.

In the spring technology survey, DePaul faculty and staff voiced their frustrations with the switch from Cisco phones to the Teams Phone service. Information Services hears your concerns, and we are working to help work through them. A message was sent to faculty and staff addressing some of the top concerns about Teams Phone. Our content team has also created a helpful indexed tutorial video (embedded in this knowledge base article - under "Individuals with DePaul-based numbers) that covers many fundamental tasks for individuals using the Teams Phone service.