Several major U.S. hospitals were forced to cancel surgeries and doctor’s appointments amid the global computer outage Friday.
What we know
- A major global IT outage is hitting industries across the world with airlines, banks, shops and broadcasters affected.
- Major U.S. airlines have grounded flights and there are global delays. United, American and Delta have ordered a “global ground stop,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.
- Microsoft said it had fixed the issue , but problems still persist and blue error screens are appearing on public screens across the U.S. and beyond.
- Texas-based Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said the problem stemmed from a “defect found in a single content update for Windows.”
- Alaska State Troopers said that 911 services were down across the state.
Hospital staffers in New York and Boston said they were unable to access some medical records or were having trouble figuring out where to send critically ill patients as several operating rooms had been shut down.
“Every day, we have a plan that’s mapped out really carefully so that we can plan our resources,” said one employee of an affected New York City hospital system. “That’s all blown up,” the staffer said, asking to not be identified because the person wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the health care system.
“The whole hospital is down,” said an employee at Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. “They asked patients to stay home today until further notice, and we can’t access virtual visits either.”
Dana-Farber is part of the larger Mass General Brigham hospital system, which tweeted that “due to the severity” of the outage, it was canceling any surgeries, procedures and medical visits that were not emergencies.
The Dana-Farber employee said that staff scheduled for today were instructed to report for duty but were unable to access patient medical records.
They have to go to every computer in the hospital individually to implement the fix.”
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute employee
“They said they identified a fix but they have to go to every computer in the hospital individually to implement the fix,” the employee said.
The health care sector is no stranger to massive computer outages.
American hospitals and other medical facilities have been under almost constant cyber attacks in the last several years from ransomware hackers, often based in Russia, who seek to lock up a victim company’s computers and demand a bitcoin payment for a code to potentially make them work again. Hospitals hit with ransomware often quickly pivot to offline solutions to help patients, such as writing patient notes and prescriptions by hand.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has said the latest problem was not an attack, but rather the result of a routine software update accidentally introducing a devastating bug into Windows computers.
The problems Friday extended well beyond Boston.
A message on New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s website said “systems issues” prompted the facility to “pause the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia.”
The University of Miami Health System warned patients to anticipate delays while its IT teams worked to get computers back online. Until then, facilities going old school — “using paper orders to disseminate information,” the hospital said in a statement on Facebook.
A letter to employees at Northwell Health in New York sent just before 9 a.m. ET said the hospital system was also experiencing problems associated with the outage.
“Given the widespread nature of the impact, we have activated our system emergency operations center to coordinate our response,” the Northwell leadership wrote.
Duke University Health System in Durham, North Carolina, said that “essential computer functions in our hospitals and clinics have been affected,” but added that clinics remained open.
But other hospitals were either totally unaffected or appeared to experience only minor blips in service.
In a statement, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta said that despite “interruptions overnight,” it had not experienced any significant impact on patient care.
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus said in a statement that while it had some technology issues, “This is our current status: All of our facilities are open.”
Akshay Syal, M.D. and Brian Cheung contributed.
