A number of voting locations in Maricopa County, Arizona, were impacted by a worldwide outage Friday, officials said.
“Please visit Locations.Maricopa.Vote for the most up-to-date information about locations that are open and their hours of operations,” the county also said.
The winner of the Republican Senate primary will face off against Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who ran unopposed in his primary, in the U.S. Senate seat. Republican candidates include former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb, and scientist Elizabeth Reye, among others.
The Epoch Times has contacted the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office for comment.
Over the years, there have been allegations of fraud and irregularities in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state and home to Phoenix, including during the 2020 and 2022 elections. With 4.5 million residents, Maricopa County is the fourth-largest county in the United States in terms of population.
The tech outage was confirmed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier on Friday, saying that it wasn’t a cyberattack. The company also said that it primarily impacts Microsoft Windows computers and systems, but not all of them. Apple and Linux computers and devices should not be affected, the firm said.
Aside from voting systems, governments, hospitals, airlines, courts, emergency services, and many more were impacted by the outage. Thousands of flights around the world were either canceled or delayed, with several U.S. airlines issuing ground stops.
Several local TV stations in the United States were prevented from airing the news early Friday, and some state and local governments reported problems at courts, motor vehicles departments, unemployment agencies, emergency call centers, and other offices. Affected hospitals had problems with appointment systems, forcing them to suspend patient visits and cancel some surgeries.
In an interview on NBC’s “Today Show,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized, 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.”
“We know what the issue is” and are working to fix it, he said. However, he noted it could take “some time” for customers needing a manual fix, which could be burdensome for businesses and government offices that don’t have adequate in-house expertise.