EPB Unaffected by Last Week’s Global Technology Outage
Chattanooga’s Electric Service Provider Escapes Outage Unscathed
Chattanooga, TN- In the wake of the recent global technology outage that caused chaos around the globe, EPB, Chattanooga’s electrical utility provider, stood out by remaining unaffected. While other companies scrambled to restore services, EPB’s normal operations proceeded without disruption.
The major technology outage, which affected numerous industries, including healthcare, banking, and the aviation sector, resulted in the unprecedented grounding of flights and forced many hospitals to defer elective surgeries. “We dodged the bullet, basically,” stated EPB’s Director of Information Security, Steve Morrison, during a company board meeting on Friday.
EPB Stands Tall Amidst Global Tech Outage
The global outage commenced last week following a faulty update disseminated by renowned cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. This led to around 8.5 million computers crashing and left companies everywhere frantically working to get their services back online. Chattanooga’s EPB, however, made it through unscathed as it does not utilize CrowdStrike’s product. Morrison expanded on the resilience displayed by stating that other utility providers needed to dedicate the entire weekend to restore their services, while EPB felt no such impact.
The Scope of the Outage’s Impact
EPB caters to approximately 180,000 homes and businesses across a 600-square-mile area. A significant fraction of Fortune 500 companies, a statistic putting the number at one in four, suffered disruptions due to the event. According to a report published by insurance firm Parametrix, a staggering estimated loss of $5.4 billion resulted from the outage. The same report highlighted how the event emphasized the critical dependency of large corporations on cloud services and the systemic risks these disruptions pose.
A Mixed Bag for Chattanooga
Although several businesses and governmental agencies in Hamilton County felt the onslaught of the outage, many continued their normal operations. For instance, during early voting, a local database was utilized by the Hamilton County Election Commission when its computers were hit by the outage. Conversely, Erlanger Health had no option but to postpone elective surgeries at some of its establishments for the day.
To summarize, while the global technology outage put many corporate and government systems on hold, Chattanooga’s EPB proved an exception to this rule and managed to dodge the malfunction without suffering any impact in its services.
