Early Friday morning, a widespread tech outage caused global disruptions to airlines, companies, and health systems. Associated Press (AP) Charlotte Graham-McLay, Elaine Kurtenbach, and David McHugh wrote that a faulty software update by Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected computers running on Microsoft Windows.
The outage affected hospitals across the states. NBC Boston's Munashe Kwangware and Alysha Palumbo reported that elective and non-emergent procedures at Mass Brigham were canceled. Reuters reported that two German hospitals also had to cancel elective surgeries due to the IT outage.
CNN's Amanda Musa and Kristina Sgueglia reported that emergency communication services were down in several states as of Friday morning.
Connor Jones with The Register reported on the effects on the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. The NHS explained that IT issues have hit the EMIS system used by practices across the country, Jones wrote.
Israel’s Health Ministry indicated that the outage impacted more than a dozen hospitals in Israel, The Times of Israel reported.
Mac McMillan, a nationally respected healthcare cybersecurity consultant and leader, said the following in a statement: “My advice for those dealing with this: This is not the time to listen to all the rumors that already are and will continue to pop up, nor is it time to accept assistance from anyone they don’t already know or have a trusted relationship with. Now is the time to have all hands on deck, heads and noses down, focusing on remediation and listening to what is coming out of CrowdStrike. Whether they are pissed at CrowdStrike or not right now, and rightfully so if they are, no one has a larger vested interest in resolving this than CrowdStrike does. Hopefully, they have their organizations ready for downtime operations. Hopefully, they have their teams trained and ready for this fire drill, and now they just need to stay calm and execute. They can yell at someone later.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz took to X to announce that the cybersecurity company is working with customers impacted by the outage. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote.
