A misconfigured Crowdstrike Falcon update pushed out to Windows early on Friday morning caused millions of computers to experience the infamous “blue screen of death,” disrupting care at hospitals, health systems and clinics in countries including the US, UK, Israel and Germany.
Clinicians don’t have access to electronic medical records or other mission-critical IT systems, so they’re caring for patients manually.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz released a statement on social media platform X on Friday morning saying the massive outage was “not the result of a security incident or cyberattack.”
Why is this important?
The incident has affected countless people and multiple industries around the world, including airlines, banks and other financial institutions, as well as healthcare organizations. Millions of Microsoft users are dealing with IT outages while consumers experience delays and disruptions.
for example, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston could not access Epic EHR On Friday morning, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Brigham branch also reported widespread disruptions and appointment cancellations across its hospitals and medical centers, according to NBC Channel 10 News.
Other IT systems in the Boston area, including the Beth Israel Deaconage Medical Center website, were reportedly down for a time but are already back online.
of The Israel Times Due to a power outage, Over 12 hospitals It is currently being operated manually, with ambulances being rerouted away from the affected medical centres.
Two hospitals at the University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany Cancellation of elective surgery According to Reuters, the cause was a global IT outage.
Britain’s National Health Service told CNN the blackout disruption to most GP practices in Englandwhich uses paper patient records but is not an emergency service.
The Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust hospital system Emergency The outage has affected radiation treatments and pharmacies are unable to receive prescription information from healthcare providers, Metro.co.uk reported.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center said numerous systems were affected.
“Our teams are working hard to minimize disruptions to patient care and system operations and are restoring our systems as quickly as possible,” the hospital said in a statement. Website.
All non-surgical appointments before 10 a.m. were cancelled, but urgent care and urgent care centres remained open, and patients with surgery or imaging appointments were advised to expect delays.
According to SC Media UK: Workaround A warning has been published about a faulty update for Crowdstrike’s Falcon sensor.
To fix machines stuck in a BSOD loop, Crowdstrike’s chief threat hunter, Brody Nisbet, recommended users do the following:
- Start Windows in Safe Mode or WRE.
- Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike
- Find and delete files matching “C-00000291*.sys”
- It will start up normally.
Larger trends
In an era when widespread and destructive cyberattacks have become commonplace, the fact that this global outage was not the result of an attack may provide some comfort, but it will be cold comfort for the countless clinicians and patients affected.
Be on record
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by the flaw found in a single content update for their Windows hosts,” Kurtz said. statement In X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.”
“We are directing customers to our support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and ongoing updates on our website,” he added. “Furthermore, we encourage organizations to get in touch with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our teams are committed to ensuring security and stability for CrowdStrike customers.”
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
The HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Forum is scheduled to take place October 31-November 1 in Washington, DC.
