The blue screens began popping up on computer screens, airport monitors, and huge billboards in Times Square. It signaled a major issue, one that required a prompt response.
On July 19, so-called "blue screens of death" appeared on screens around the world, indicating that a critical error had occurred on Microsoft Windows systems. Those systems became unusable, triggering a panic for some businesses like airlines and banks. The specific system that had gone down was CrowdStrike, a software in charge of endpoint security.
Within minutes of the outage, it was Arizonans making the call to alert officials. The IT team at Arizona's Secretary of State says it was one of the first in the nation to notify security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security about the outage.
"We learned of the CrowdStrike issue within five minutes of it happening," said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. "We stood up our entire IT team, even though I think it was 11 o'clock at night or 10 o'clock at night."
CrowdStrike is one of many tools used by the Secretary of State's office to protect its election systems, which are constantly under attack by both foreign and domestic threats. On the worst days, there can be billions of malicious network probes into just the Arizona Secretary of State's system.
Fontes says Arizona, in particular, may receive more probes than its peers due to the attention it receives by those spreading falsehoods about election results.
The CrowdStrike outage occurred in July because of a flawed software update sent from the CrowdStrike office. At the Secretary of State's office, all systems were back up in about 12 hours.
Arizona was especially prepared to respond to the outage because of its position as a target of threats following disinformation and misinformation campaigns, in part perpetrated by foreign actors, around the 2020 and 2022 elections.
"We've got foreign adversaries and we have domestic adversaries that are really trying to hack into our stuff. Iran as a state actor, China, Russia, they want to disrupt our systems and they want us to mistrust each other," Fontes said. "They can't get us militarily, they can't get us diplomatically, they can't get us economically, so they want to build mistrust among us. That's why they try to tear us apart. Part of that is creating doubt in our elections."
Arizona is far from the only entity to be targeted by foreign entities over election issues. Federal officials have repeatedly warned foreign governments would seek to meddle in the presidential election, and the U.S. has recently accused Iran of launching cyberattacks, trying to take documents from both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's campaigns.
Fontes takes pride in his efforts to secure IT systems both in his former role as Maricopa County Recorder and current statewide role. Coming from a Marine Corps background where he was a classified materials controller, Fontes was motivated to implement a series of upgrades to secure the agency after years of underfunding and technical blockades.
"We do have great systems here," he said. "Nothing is perfect, we'll be clear. But we want voters to know that they can have confidence that their systems are about as secure as they can be."
Fontes and the Secretary of State's office are preparing for the potential of new, concentrated attacks sparked by whatever November's election results may be.
"Some of the things that we're really prepared for don't just include the information technology or network attacks, right?" he added. "We're also preparing for what we call 'denial of service.' But it's analog, right? All the lawsuits that are gonna happen, all the complaining that's gonna happen."
