The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) on Monday announced that its computer systems, including FHA Connection (FHAC) — which provides FHA-approved lenders and business partners with secure online access to computer systems at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — have been restored as of Monday morning following a global tech outage on Friday.
“The FHA system outages of Friday, July 19, 2024, have been resolved. All FHA systems are now fully operational,” the agency announced Monday. “We apologize for any inconvenience these issues may have caused.”
Late on Friday, FHA provided a statement to HousingWire about the disruption to its computer systems.
“HUD was informed of the global impact and worked with our partners to quickly restore any services negatively affected by the event. HUD works diligently to ensure the security, stability, and availability of services supporting the public,” a department spokesperson said.
FHA Connection, as well as computer systems at multiple federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) were impacted by a global technology disruption on Friday that knocked out core functionality of Microsoft Windows-based computers running software from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
The cybersecurity company’s ubiquity across core business industries and government services led to widespread disruption across the public and private sectors, including air travel, health care, retail and more. Upon the opening of the stock market Monday morning, CrowdStrike’s share price took a notable hit stemming from the incident.
Leaders at both CrowdStrike and Microsoft were quick to declare that the disruption was caused by the interaction between a faulty software update and the Windows operating system. They aimed to quickly dispel any connection between the disruption and a coordinated cyberattack.
In addition to government computer systems, ICE Mortgage Technologies confirmed for HousingWire on Friday that its Encompass loan origination system was impacted by the outage. As of 10 a.m. Pacific time on July 20, however, the ICE status center website stated that all Encompass functionality had been restored.
The Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS) also stated on Friday that its systems had been impacted but returned to normal functionality later that day.
