VANCOUVER — About 50,000 devices in British Columbia hospitals and health facilities were impacted by the CrowdStrike global technology outage, forcing staff to pivot to using paper to manage everything from lab work to meal orders, the province's health minister said.
Adrian Dix said experts began immediately working on the problem, which has impacted computers running Microsoft Windows, and that the systems are beginning to come back online.
Dix said Friday that 30,000 of the impacted devices belonged to health authorities in the Lower Mainland and the event had "a profound impact on staff" across the province, but they did everything possible to limit the impact on patients.
"Say you're opening an urgent and primary care centre at eight in the morning, and your systems are affected. You have to adapt and then try and keep it as normal as possible," he said.
"I know there are urgent primary care centres that were delayed in taking their first patients by about seven minutes this morning, which shows the dedication of the staff (and) how quickly they moved."
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, but the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
B.C. Premier David Eby told an unrelated news conference that the outage had no impact on the provincial wildfire service, 911, or any of the province's police departments or the RCMP.
He said the call centre at the Ministry of Children and Family Development experienced some slowdowns and people may have been delayed in getting their B.C. family benefits, which are administered by Revenue Canada.
Eby said information put on paper will need to be inputted into the electronic health records of hospitals and care facilities across the province, which "can be a fair bit of work."
Officials at Vancouver's airport said that while its IT systems were not affected by the outage, airlines were forced to adjust their schedules.
A statement from the airport said about 20 per cent of flights were delayed arriving on Friday between 5 a.m. and noon and about 28 per cent were delayed taking off.
The statement said the average delay was less than 50 minutes.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 19, 2024.
Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press
