How the CrowdStrike global IT outage affected Canadians

A global technology outage linked to a faulty software update has had a ripple effect on Canadians.

Nancy Haslam, owner of Maximum Signs in Pontypool, Ont., which creates highway and traffic signs, says the outage prevented employees at her business from receiving their pay.

She said she processed payroll Thursday and found out Friday morning that the funds hadn’t been deposited into their bank accounts.

“Now they’re still waiting for the money to show up into their account,” Haslam said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca on Friday morning. “I’m hoping that surely it will be fixed, so we are kind of holding our breath at this point.”

She said she’s keeping up to date on developments in the news so she hasn’t contacted anyone to try to resolve the problem.

“It’s an inconvenience for sure and hopefully it doesn’t carry on too long,” Haslam said. “There’s really nothing much we can do. You can hold your breath and hope it can work itself out sooner rather than later.”

The widespread outage disrupted services and companies around the world Friday, including grounding flights and knocking banking and hospital systems offline.

A fix is incoming and the outage was not related to a security incident or cyberattack, said cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The disruptions worsened hours after the problem occurred.

CrowdStrike said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

Delayed child benefit payments

Katie Kobzeba, a stay-at-home mom of five children in Toronto, says she was alarmed when her direct deposit for the monthly Canada Child Benefit didn’t arrive on time. She said she gets the benefit around the 20th of every month, deposited into her TD Bank account by 3:30 a.m.

With four children under the age of 18, she was expecting about $2,800 from the benefit. Her oldest child is 21.

When she checked this morning, she still didn’t see the payments, and soon found out other people were having problems getting their money as well. To help tide her over through the weekend, she borrowed money from her mother-in-law.

“I was trying to get my kids ready for camp, trying to borrow money,” she said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca.

Anxious that ATMs might also be affected, she went to the teller at a TD Bank branch to withdraw the money from her mother-in-law’s e-transfer. “I didn’t know how long it would last so I borrowed a couple of hundred,” she said, noting that thankfully there were only four other customers in line. She then took the streetcar to bring her four kids to summer camp, 20 minutes behind schedule due to the outage.

Kobzeba’s Canada Child Benefit installment eventually arrived at about 9:30 a.m.

With files from The Associated Press