Trinidad and Tobago escaped much of the fallout of the Crowdstrike update that crippled services globally.
The shutdowns of Windows PCs, many of them used for public service kiosks and to serve customers in banks and airports was quickly patched by the cybersecurity company, but not before the company’s share price took a dive of more than ten percent and customers began thinking about alternatives.

Crowdstrike’s Falcon endpoint solution is an expensive, top of the line cybersecurity defence that’s deployed widely.
In statements, the company emphasised that the problem originated in a content update and was not a cyberattack or security breach.
While some systems recovered with a subsequent update, systems secured by encryption, including the widely used BitLocker, required time-consuming hands on intervention.

Crowdstrike responded to the dramatic shutdowns by posting a rolling blog that incorporated approaches to a wide range of PC usage scenarios, which included backroom servers and Citrix virtual machine deployments.
For even its more technical users, the company was careful to emphasise in bold and italic type, that “Crowdstrike is operating normally and this issue does not affect our Falcon platform systems.”

In a statement, T&TEC responded to reports about payment issues as follows, “T&TEC wishes to advise its customers that a brief disruption to its online payment platforms, due to the current global IT outage, has been resolved. Customers can therefore resume payments via Quick Pay and Customer Web Access (CWA). Payments at Service Centres via card and cash are also being processed as normal.”

Responding to questions on the matter, Flow’s Country Manager, Simone Martin-Sulgan made the following statement, “Our residential and corporate telecommunications services were not affected. Some of the internal systems used to serve our customers were impacted in the early hours of the morning at the start of the outage affecting our ability to complete some transactions, but we are happy to report they are already fully functional.”

Colin Greaves, corporate communications lead at Digicel said that, “Digicel does not use the IT or cybersecurity software that has been experiencing issues worldwide. Digicel’s services remained unaffected and continue to function as they should.”

“Some of our stores, however, experienced issues with their point of sale terminals when attempting to accept card payments, as some local banks have been affected by the issue. Our customers have been using our other convenient bill payment methods to ensure that they stay connected. We continue to monitor the situation and provide support as needed.”

“TSTT’s services have not been impacted by the recent global IT issues affecting multiple sectors,” the company said.
“At this time, our services to government, business, residential, and mobile customers remain fully operational and uninterrupted.”
“We are actively monitoring the situation as it develops to assess any potential impact on our vendors and stakeholders. Rest assured that we are prepared to take necessary action to ensure the reliability, continuity, and security of our services.”