Worldwide tech outage disrupts hospitals, airlines, banks and other industries. Here is the latest

A global tech outage was disrupting operations in multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters taken off the air and everything from banking to health care hit by system problems.

According to an alert sent by the global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s Falcon Sensor software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the blue screen of death.

The problem crashed Windows machines and servers, sending them into a loop of recovery so that they couldn’t restart.

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CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, company CEO George Kurtz said in a message posted on social media. 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.

Disruptions hit health services 

Canadian airlines, business, government agencies, hospitals and media outlets — including CBC — suffered the effects of the outage, which began overnight. 

British Columbia health authorities say the disruption affected its networks and computers across all systems. The five regional authorities all have notices on their websites, saying they have implemented contingency plans to ensure health-care services remain operational. The alerts remained on the websites as of 11:30 a.m. PT. 

Toronto’s University Health Network says the outage is affecting some of its systems but clinical activity at its hospitals is continuing as scheduled.

However, it warns that some patients may experience delays.

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) also said some of its operations were affected but that all of its hospitals are safe and remain open including Hamilton General Hospital. HHS said some non-urgent appointments and procedures may be delayed and that it would be contacting those people who are affected.

The outage also affected the availability of some health-care services in Newfoundland and Labrador (new window), according to a statement from N.L. Health Services.

IT systems — including Meditech, the main system used to manage patient and finance information — were affected, but that system was running normally again by 2 p.m. NT, the organization said.

Domestic, international airlines affected

Airports across Canada have advised customers travelling or doing pickups of family and friends to check flight status with the airlines before heading out. 

In Toronto, a spokesperson from Pearson International Airport told CBC News the impacts varied airline to airline.

Porter Airlines, which operates flights across Canada and to some U.S. locations, said all flights would be cancelled until at least 3 p.m. ET on Friday. The company said just after 6 a.m. that its call centre agents did not have access to reservation or rebooking information, and it’s directing customers to its website for updates.

Any passengers needing to cancel travel plans as a direct result of the systems issue will be offered refunds, said Porter. Normal flight change fees are also being waived.

WATCH | Air travellers scramble:

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Other Canadian airlines — including Air Canada, WestJet, Sunwing and Flair — did not appear to be affected, Pearson airport said in a separate statement, but added that major U.S. air carriers (Delta, American, United) were having problems.

Out of over 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 2,691 have been cancelled globally so far and more are expected to be called off, according to data from global aviation analytics firm Cirium.

In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded for an extended time.

Internationally, airports from the U.K. to India and Hong Kong reported delays, with some resorting to manual check-ins. Ryanair and Air India were among the airlines most impacted.

Snags for border agencies

Representatives from the international airports in Montreal and Vancouver told CBC News that U.S. customs officials could not process passengers heading to American destinations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection released its own statement indicating the issue, related to the global CrowdStrike outage, had been resolved.

Montreal-Trudeau International Airport said the problem has been resolved and passenger processing is gradually resuming. 

Traffic delays at points of entry on land between Canada and the U.S. were also reported.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said in a statement that it had experienced a partial systems outage of its telephone reporting system that was subsequently resolved. The statement did not make reference to CrowdStrike and Microsoft issues.

WATCH | CBC News speaks with delayed passengers in Fredericton:

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CEO ‘deeply sorry’ 

Kurtz, the CrowdStrike CEO, appeared on NBC’s morning news program Today to apologize for the company’s software failure. 

We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company, he said.

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

The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. The website Downdetector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon.

WATCH | Cybersecurity expert says those affected should ‘get mad’:

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Microsoft said on Friday that the underlying cause for outage of its 365 apps and services has been fixed, but the residual impact of cybersecurity outages are continuing to affect some customers.

CrowdStrike says it has more than 20,000 subscription customers around the world, with over half of Fortune 500 companies using its software, according to company promotional materials from this year.

As a result, a number of companies across sectors were affected.

FedEx Corp said on Friday it experienced substantial disruptions to deliveries throughout its networks.

Contingency plans have been activated to mitigate impacts but potential delays are possible for package deliveries with a delivery commitment of July 19, FedEx said.

The CBC experienced some issues with automated broadcasting processes, affecting control room operations, cameras and graphics, that were resolved after a few hours.

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Scale of outage concerns experts

Even as companies and institutions began restoring regular services, experts said the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.

This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure, Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre, told Reuters.

I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale, said Martin.

Ritesh Kotak, cybersecurity and tech analyst, told CBC News Network that clients and consumers will have to be patient.

A lot of these systems have redundancies that are built into them. So, for example, when one system fails, it can piggyback off another system; it just literally passes the baton, said Kotak.

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It’s not as smooth sometimes as one may think … but depending on the scale of the servers impacted sometimes it takes just a little bit of time to pass over that baton and then fix the problem and then bring those services back on to the original servers.

The outage created challenges for some doctors and hospitals in Canada and internationally.

We are aware of the IT outage and the challenges it is creating for health-care professionals and hospitals. We are actively monitoring the situation and working with partners across Canada to support our health infrastructure, Health Minister Mark Holland said in a statement.

An adaptation of this news story is available in Punjabi

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With files from CBC News and The Associated Press