‘We’re helping by offering community support, helping with recovery plans, offering up our staff to augment the MSSPs and helping wherever we can,’ says Marc Menzies, president and CTO of Overview Technology Solutions. ‘We’re saying, “Hey, I know that everyone’s morning is messed up, ours is now messed up too but we’re here to help and support you guys. We know if the shoe was on the other foot, we know they’d drop things to help us.’

MSPs are reaching out and offering help throughout the IT channel community amid the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage that is affecting major airlines, banks, hospitals and other businesses worldwide.

The outage comes as cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed out a defective content update for Windows hosts, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a LinkedIn post.

While some MSPs may not be directly impacted, or are not a CrowdStrike partner, they are reaching out to others in the industry to help.

Marc Menzies, president and CTO of New York-based MSP Overview Technology Solutions, early Friday morning reached out to MSSPs he knows to offer support and assistance wherever he can.

“I would just send a text and say, ‘Hey, I know this is in your stack, how can I help you?’” he told CRN. “I already worked with one MSSP this morning and reviewed what the resolution offered by CrowdStrike was.”

[Related: 5 Things To Know On The CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage]

He offered his business’ help desk number and communicated with his team on how to help if an impacted individual calls. He has seen others do the same, noting that the community has come together to help.

“We’re helping by offering community support, helping with recovery plans, offering up our staff to augment the MSSPs and helping wherever we can,” he said. “We’re saying, “Hey, I know that everyone’s morning is messed up, ours is now messed up too, but we’re here to help and support you guys. We know if the shoe was on the other foot, we know they’d drop things to help us.”

Henry Timm, president of Rolling Prairie, Ind.-based MSP Phantom Technology Solutions, has been identifying customers he may do co-managed IT for or any business he may have a relationship with to offer help.

“We found that people are overwhelmed just by the sheer number of endpoints that they have to manually touch to resolve this,” he said. “Primarily, we’re educating and providing an extra set of hands for those needed.”

He had a call with one business where its IT manager was traveling overseas, so Timm stepped in “to try and get them up and stable for the time being.”

He said he has “a lot of empathy” for those impacted as an outage like this can happen to anyone.

“Overall, there’s been a positive response where people have shown empathy,” he said. “They’ve openly offered to do what they can, shared solutions and are offering to be just an extra set of hands.”

Jack Skinner is doing the same. The CTO of Oversee My IT, a Lewisville, Texas-based MSP, is reaching out to friends and different community groups to get the word out about those offering resources and guidance.

“People join communities for this exact reason,” he said. “They expect that support to come from those communities when this happens. That’s what we can do. We can put boots on the ground and send a tech and help. That’s why we’re here, to pull together and help each other.”

Jason Slagle, president of CNWR, a Toledo, Ohio-based MSP, said he has one co-managed customer that has been impacted and is reaching out to others in the industry to lend a hand.

“I am keeping my eye out for others,” he told CRN. “Unfortunately, due to the nature of this problem it’s not really easy to help.”

He said unlike a breach, the outage requires a fix where hands have to touch the machine, “There’s not really a lot you can do.”

However, he is keeping his ear to the ground if he discovers there are any impacted businesses in his area where he and his team can drive there and physically help.

“We are a community so what people need to realize is sometimes we have bad days,” he said. “The community will be judged by how we treat each other on our worst days. It’s really easy to pile on and throw mud at CrowdStrike, but they’re people too. However bad your day is, I imagine the people at CrowdStrike are having an even worse day, so don’t lose sight of that.”