A misconfigured Crowdstrike Falcon update pushed to Windows early Friday morning caused millions of computers to display the infamous “blue screen of death,” disrupting the delivery of care at hospitals, health systems and clinics in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, Germany and other countries.
Clinicians are working manually to care for patients without access to electronic health records and other critical IT systems.
The widespread outage was “not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement Friday morning on social media platform X.
WHY IT MATTERS
The outage has impacted countless people and industries around the world – not just healthcare organizations, but also airlines, banks, and other financial institutions. Millions of Microsoft users are facing IT outages as consumers experience delays and disruptions.
For example, according to NBC Channel 10 News, the Epic EHR was inaccessible at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on Friday morning, while Mass General Brigham and Women’s Hospital also reported widespread outages and appointment cancellations at its hospitals and medical centers.
Other IT systems in the Boston area, including the website of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center, were reportedly down for a period of time, but are now back online.
The Israel Times is reporting that the power outage has affected operations at more than a dozen hospitals that are now operating manually, with ambulances having to be diverted away from affected medical centers.
Two hospitals at the University Clinic Schleswig-Holstein in Germany have canceled elective surgeries due to a global IT outage, Reuters reported.
The UK National Health Service told CNN that the power outage was disrupting most GP practices in the UK, which use paper medical records but not emergency services.
One hospital system – the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust – has declared a major incident due to a power outage. The outage is affecting radiotherapy treatments and pharmacies are not receiving prescription information from suppliers, Metro.co.uk reports.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center said several hospital systems were affected.
“Our team is working diligently to minimize disruption to patient care and system operations, and we are restoring systems as quickly as possible,” the hospital said on its website.
Non-surgical appointments before 10 a.m. have been canceled, while emergency and urgent care centers remain open. Patients with scheduled surgeries and imaging appointments have been advised to prepare for delays.
According to SC Media UK, a fix for Crowdstrike’s Falcon sensor update bug has been announced.
To fix a machine stuck in a BSOD loop, Brody Nisbet, principal threat hunter at Crowdstrike, recommends users:
- Start Windows in Safe Mode or WRE.
- Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike
- Locate and delete files matching “C-00000291*.sys”
- Normal startup.
THE BIGGER TREND
In an age where widespread and disruptive cyberattacks are becoming more common, the fact that this global blackout was not caused by an attack is somewhat reassuring. It is also cold comfort to the countless clinicians and patients who have been affected by it.
ON PROFILE
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a bug found in a single content update for Windows servers,” Kurtz said in a statement on X. “Mac and Linux servers are not affected. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.
“We refer customers to our support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide full and ongoing updates on our website,” he added. “We also encourage organizations to ensure they are communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
The HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Forum is scheduled to take place from October 31 to November 1 in Washington, D.C.
