Tesla halted some of its production lines due to the Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage

A photo of Teslas cars on the production line of the company’s Austin, Texas Gigafactory.Getty/ Suzanne Cordeiro

Tesla halted some production lines due to a global IT outage early Friday morning.
The outage, linked to an issue at CrowdStrike, affected servers and manufacturing devices, Tesla told staff.
The IT outage has caused issues across the globe as many Windows systems were taken offline.

Tesla shut down some of its production lines on Friday morning as a result of the widespread IT outage that roiled companies across the world. The issue did not appear to impact every production line.

The carmaker sent some of its factory workers home early during the night shift at its Austin, Texas and Sparks, Nevada facilities after some of the machinery at the factory started displaying error messages due to the global IT outage, according to three sources with knowledge of the issue.

Tesla sent staff a notice on Friday morning that the company had been impacted by a “Windows Host Outage” which caused issues with servers, laptops, and manufacturing devices, according to the memo obtained by Business Insider.

The company said “users are seeing a blue screen on their devices.”

Tesla factory workers have yet to receive notice of when the impacted lines will go back into production, the sources told BI. Some lines at the Austin factory were still running on Friday morning, one worker said.

A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was quick to make light of the global outage on X, boosting a meme that had the caption: “Everything else is down, but this app still works.”

But he later responded to a post from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on social media to say that the issue, which impacted Windows, “gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain.”

The Microsoft outage, which has been linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has caused widespread issues to a variety of companies, shutting down airlines, retailers, and banks. Many Microsoft users were met with a blue screen notifying them that their device “ran into a problem” on Friday morning.

Microsoft said on X that the company is investigating the issue.

“We’ve completed our mitigation actions and our telemetry indicates all previously impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services have recovered. We’re entering a period of monitoring to ensure impact is fully resolved. For more information, see MO821132 within the admin center,” the company wrote in an update on X.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that a fix has been deployed, but that some customers required manual updates, which could take more time to implement.

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