Electric vehicle maker Tesla temporarily halted production on lines at some of its manufacturing facilities Friday after an unprecedented IT outage impacted global operations due to system issues at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
According to correspondence obtained by CNBC, Tesla’s IT teams notified employees that there was a “windows host outage,” and different systems were affected including “servers, laptops and manufacturing devices.” The IT teams informed Tesla employees that they may see a “blue screen” on their various devices.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also owns social media platform X, posted several complaints about the CrowdStrike outages to his account, which has more than 190 million followers, throughout the morning.
Two Tesla employees who spoke with CNBC, but asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, said that some manufacturing lines were slow to start on Friday morning, and others were temporarily halted in California and Nevada. They also said managers were telling some workers to prepare for canceled shifts or to go home early.
Business Insider, which first reported on the IT memo, wrote that workers in Tesla’s Texas vehicle assembly plant were sent home overnight in response to the outages as well.
As a key Tesla vendor, Microsoft, scrambled to restore its apps and services Friday morning, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a statement on X that an update from CrowdStrike on Thursday impacted global IT systems.
In replies to Nadella on X, Musk wrote that the outages had caused a “seizure” to the automotive supply chain, adding, “We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems, so no rollouts at all.” Employees confirmed that Tesla was using CrowdStrike as of Friday.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for further information.
