Voting locations in Maricopa County, Arizona were affected by the global Crowdstrike outage on Friday night, officials confirmed.
Maricopa has been dogged by allegations of serious voting irregularities in recent years, including during the 2020 and 2022 elections, but these difficulties appear to have been beyond the control of local officials.
In a statement published on its website, the Maricopa Elections Department said it was “experiencing an outage at some voting locations.”
“Please visit Locations.Maricopa.Vote for the most up-to-date information about locations that are open and their hours of operations.”
The Pima County Recorder’s Office also issued a statement confirming that its machines had suffered outages, but assured the public that there had been “no impact to voters.”
“We’ve been working all night with the Department of Homeland Security to minimize any sort of disruption,” said JP Martin, a deputy communications director for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
“We’re still monitoring the situation with our county partners and making sure they have the support they need.”
Early voting for Arizona’s primary elections began on 3 July, with the election due to be held on 30 July.
The outage is part of a global outage caused by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. The company has confirmed that the problem, due to a faulty software update, mostly affects Windows computers and not Apple or Linux systems. Thousands of flights were cancelled or delayed and government, medical and legal services were affected, as well as businesses.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized for the outages in a televised interview, saying the company was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies.”
He confirmed that the company “know what the issue is” and will fix it. However, he added that it could take time to remedy the problem in full, because some customers will require a manual fix to ensure their systems work properly.
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