Donovan Moretz, AUSD's network adminstrator, had planned to take July 19 off. But when he woke up at 6:30 am and looked online, he saw reports of a massive CrowdStrike outage. The company had released an update to its Falcon software, which organizations around the world use to detect and block hackers and malware, but it hadn't synced properly with Windows operating systems. This was about to result in the largest IT outage in history.

 

Donovan, who is going into his 11^th year here in AUSD, immediately checked his email and found alerts that 12 of AUSD’s 56 servers had been affected. Donovan was able to fix the issue from home by calling up the backups created the night before and essentially rebuilding those servers. “We had the critical data covered by 7:30 am,” he says. “By 9:00 am everything was up and running again.”

 

Donovan attributes AUSD’s quick recovery to the district’s rigorous back-up systems. “In the end, we only lost a day’s worth of data,” he says. (Going forward, AUSD will back up data four times a day.)

 

His supervisor, Robyn Odell, however, also cites Donovan’s expertise and quick wits. “Donovan saw the problem and immediately acted to ensure systems were up and running by the time most staff started their workday,” she says. ‘His skill and willingness to take responsibility can’t be underestimated. We are very lucky to have him on our team.”