Texas DPS driver license offices closed Friday due to global tech outage

Houston flights affected by global technology outage

Flights in Houston were impacted by a global technology outage on Friday that caused some airlines to ground flights.

Texas DPS said driver license offices across the state were closed Friday due to a technical outage impacting systems around the world.

The agency said their IT teams were working on a fix, but there was no estimate on when the driver license offices would reopen.

"The global CrowdStrike incident is impacting the Texas Department of Public Safety. Multiple applications and services are impaired and unavailable. All scheduled driver license appointments for today, Friday, July 19th, 2024, have been canceled. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause," Texas DPS said in a message on their website.

Customers with appointments should have been notified, Texas DPS said.

The agency said they would share updates on their social media and the Texas DPS website.

Global technology outage Friday

Businesses, airlines and even hospitals around the world were reporting problems Friday due to a global technology outage.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack — and that a fix was on the way. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was "working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact" and that they were "observing a positive trend in service availability."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.