Fierce Healthcare
A widespread global IT outage impacted health systems, hospitals and clinics as electronic health record software has been knocked offline, forcing providers to cancel or delay non-emergency procedures and services.
Several states across the U.S. also reported that their emergency 911 call centers have been hit. The outage also impacted banks, media companies and airlines, with thousands of flights canceled.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Friday morning the company is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike said in a statement posted to its website and Kurtz also said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” Kurtz said, as NBC reported. “Our systems are always looking for the latest attacks from these adversaries that are out there.”
For the healthcare industry, the massive IT outage comes five months after a massive ransomware attack at UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare cause widespread disruption and a significant financial fallout for hospitals, pharmacies and medical groups. Although the Microsoft/CrowdStrike outage is not a security incident or a cyberattack, the disruption highlights how a glitch a third-party vendor can have a ripple effect on the industry.
Epic staff are working with customer IT teams to restore access as fixes or mitigation approaches are available from CrowdStrike.” — Epic spokesperson
Analysts at Fitch Ratings report that the widespread fallout will likely be muted for non-profit hospitals despite short-term impacts and scaling back normal operations.
Hospital computer systems impacted
Some healthcare centers report that they are not affected by the outage while others had to suspend medical visits, surgeries and procedures.
Mass General Brigham said the worldwide software outage affected many of its systems impacting providers’ access to clinical systems, including patient health records and scheduling.
The health system canceled all non-urgent medical visits at all of its hospitals and clinics Friday, according to a statement posted to its website.
The health system said hospitals are open for urgent appointments and procedures, and emergency rooms remain open.
The outage prompted Kaiser Permanente to activate its national command center at 4:30 a.m. PT to address the incident, evaluate the impacts to care operations, computer systems and servers, and coordinate recovery as needed, according to Steve Shivinsky, director of national media relations at the health system.
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