DALLAS — Texas Department of Public Safety driver license offices were closed across the state Friday morning due to a technical issue, officials said.
Texas DPS officials posted on X that the agency's information technology teams were "working diligently on a fix, however there is no current estimate on when [offices] will reopen."
Officials said people who had appointments at the driver's license offices should have been notified of the closures.
While it was not confirmed by officials what the issue was, a widespread Microsoft disruption was causing problems on systems across the world late Thursday and into Friday morning. "Coming here was a surprise and it sucks," said Abdullah Siddiq. He told WFAA he had an appointment set to renew his license for the 19th for at least a month.
"This is like 25 minutes from my house too, and you know you have to plan your day around this," said Siddiq.
Microsoft users worldwide, including banks and airlines, reported widespread outages on Friday, hours after the company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Martin Yarborough is the Principal Consultant with Martin Yarborough & Associates. He said luckily this was not a cyber attack. "This was was failed update," he said.
Yarborough said the failure came from one of the products the company uses to block online attacks. He said important files like data should still be intact.
The best thing he suggested for people is to have patience.
"This too shall pass but it's just going to take a little bit of time, not to panic," said Yarborough.
The biggest impacts were being seen with airlines, several of which had to issue system-wide ground stops due to technical issues.
A representative with American Airlines confirmed Friday morning that a technical issue with CrowdStrike was impacting multiple carriers.
While the full scope of the impacts remained unclear, WFAA crews on Friday morning saw some of the issues first-hand at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport: Travelers trying to check in at airport kiosks would be met with the so-called "blue screen of death" due to the outage. Other travelers reported flight delays and cancellations, while some travelers reported no issues at all.