Canada Child Benefit payments may be delayed by global IT outage, says federal government | CBC News

The Canada Revenue Agency has started sending out Canada Child Benefit (CCB) payments — but the federal government is warning recipients those payments may be delayed due to a worldwide IT outage that began Friday.

Minister of National Revenue Marie-Claude Bibeau said on social media that the Canada Revenue Agency “is not affected by the global IT outage and has sent out CCB payments to all eligible families.”

Bibeau added, however, that the federal government is aware of “potential challenges some banks may encounter in delivering the payments” and will work with the banks to “ensure seamless transactions.”

The global outage has disrupted operations in multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters going dark and every sector from banking to health care being hit by system problems.

Global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said its Falcon Sensor software caused Microsoft Windows to crash, triggering what’s colloquially known as “the blue screen of death.”

George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, said in a message posted on social media that the company 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,” Kurtz said. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

In a statement, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s signals intelligence agency, said the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security contacted Crowdstrike and offered assistance “in the event they should need it.”

“At this time, this does not appear to be a cyber security incident. We want to reassure Canadians that we are working with Government of Canada partners to assess any potential impacts this may have,” CSE said.

Kurtz also said that while some systems won’t automatically recover, the company would “make sure every customer is fully recovered.”