Bad software upgrade grounded flights, disrupted hospitals and backed up border crossings
A global technology outage grounded flights, disrupted hospitals, backed up border crossings and even upended coffee orders in Canada on Friday, as issues persisted hours after problems with Microsoft services were said to be on the mend.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the glitch felt round the world occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows — and that the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and disruptions continued after the techcompany said it was gradually fixing the problem.
Major Canadian companies, including Porter Airlines and Telus, said their operations had been affected. Provincial health authorities in British Columbia and Newfoundland reported disruptions, as did several major Ontario hospitals.
Brent Arnold, a Toronto-based cybersecurity and technology lawyer, called Friday’s outage a software update gone wrong.
“This may be, I think, the biggest-scale one that we’ve seen,” said Arnold, a partner at Gowling WLG.
Porter Airlines, which initially grounded flights until noon, extended cancellations until 3 p.m. EDT due to the outage. By 12:30, the country’s third-largest airline had scrapped 56 flights, or 26 per cent of its 212 scheduled takeoffs, according to aviation data firm Cirium.More than 7,000 customers were affected, and its website was down until mid-afternoon.
Martin Bertrand, who was slated to fly Porter from Toronto to the U.S. for a weekend trip with his wife, said his plans had been thrown into limbo.
“We’re kind of disappointed that this whole thing happened,” he said in an interview from Toronto Island’s Billy Bishop Airport.
“We’re still in the dark. So, we’re trying to figure out if there’s a glimmer of hope for us.”
Allan Friedland, who was set to fly from Billy Bishop to New Jersey for a family gathering, said he had to rebook on an Air Canada flight out of Toronto Pearson International Airport.
“We should hopefully make it,” he said.
At Pearson airport, as well as the main airports in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal, the vast majority of arrivals and departures between Canada and the U.S. were called off or postponed.
Passengers at Pearson saw early morning departures to cities including Houston, Denver and Washington, D.C., delayed for up to five hours. Flights from Chicago and Newark, N.J., were cancelled.
U.S. airlines were among the carriers affected, including United and Delta Air Lines, which have partnerships with Air Canada and WestJet, respectively. However, the fact the outage occurred overnight meant fewer flights were affected, with airlines’ IT systems back up and running by sunrise on the East Coast.
“From a global perspective, the impact in Canada is pretty minimal compared to what happened in other parts of the world,” said aviation consultant Duncan Dee, pointing to widespread disarray and what some people described as chaos at airports in parts of Europe and Asia.
Some travellers will likely have to wait up to 72 hours before they reach their destinations, Dee said, “not to mention the rolling delays that will occur as a result of this.”
At Flair Airlines, the glitch caused “Windows to crash and show the blue screen of death” at about 1 a.m. EDT, said Maciej Wilk, interim CEO of the discount carrier.
“It certainly ruined the night for several people here,” he said in an interview, adding that the problem was patched within hours and no flights were delayed as a result.
Other companies with a presence at airports were not so lucky. Starbucks said its mobile order ahead and pay features were temporarily out of order.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” traveller Robert Harris said in a social media post from Pearson, “the ground stoppage or the fact that the Starbucks order ahead isn’t working. Both are causing massive lines.”
Disruptions extended to health care, government offices and other agencies.
University Health Network in Toronto, one of Canada’s largest hospital networks, said some of its systems had been affected by the outage. In a social media post, it said clinical activity continued but some delays were possible.
Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital also reported it had been affected by the outage.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare said its Hamilton hospital remained open as it worked on a fix to the issues it was experiencing with its IT systems.
Arnold, the Toronto cybersecurity lawyer, said the outage was a startling reminder of how dependent companies in Canada and around the world have become on just a handful of operating systems.
“We have also become more vulnerable because of that concentration in just a few companies and a few pieces of vital technology,” he said.
“It’s probably going to be days or weeks before we understand the full impact.”
In British Columbia, the provincial health system was affected by the outage. In a statement, the Provincial Health Services Authority said it had implemented contingency plans to keep service operational and that patient care was “not disrupted to the best of our ability.”
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador advised users of its digital platforms of possible service disruptions. The province’s health authority, NL Health Services, said its IT services had also been affected, including the main information system used to manage patient care and finance information.
The outage reached the border too.
The Canada Border Services Agency said it had experienced a partial systems outage of its telephone reporting system, primarily used by small aircraft passengers and boaters, that had since been resolved.
“The CBSA worked urgently with its partners and service providers to mitigate any disruptions and restore full service as quickly as possible,” spokeswoman Jacqueline Roby wrote in a statement.
“No CBSA systems are affected at this time.”
Earlier on Friday, Windsor police reported long delays at both Canada-U.S. border crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
Banks in Canada were “reviewing the situation based on updates from their technology partners,” a spokeswoman for the Canadian Bankers Association said.
“Any current impacts on banking services would be temporary,” Maggie Cheung said in a statement.
Calvin Watt, who said he held an investment account with RBC, said he was unable to make any trades Friday morning.
“Nothing is able to go through,” he said, speaking in the lobby of a downtown Toronto office building. “I am still not able to make trades.”
At least one major Canadian telecommunications carrier said the outage had affected its operations.
A spokeswoman for Telus said some of its employees were unable to access “the tools and systems necessary to support our customers.” The company was working with “the utmost urgency” to get the systems working again, she said.
Bell and Rogers, two of the other major carriers, said their networks were unaffected.
Canada Post said a small number of post offices across the country appeared to be affected by the outage, calling the impact to customers “minimal.”
Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
CrowdStrike said it was working with customers hit by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” it wrote in a statement.
The problem hit the theatre world as well. Mirvish Productions said Friday morning its online, phone and in-person ticket sales were unavailable, with no update as of late afternoon.
John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University, said the incident should serve as a “warning sign” to airlines and companies across the globe.
“There’s no such thing as a fool-proof solution.”