B.C. health-care among gov’t services affected by Microsoft outage

The B.C. government said the province’s health-care system was among the government services impacted by the global Microsoft outage.

In a statement posted to social media Friday morning, Vancouver Coastal Health said B.C. was “impacted by the CrowdStrike disruption.”

“Our primary concern is the continuity and quality of patient care. We have implemented contingency plans to ensure that our health care services remain operational and that patient care is not disrupted to the best of our ability,” VCH said.

The health authority is urging people to contact their care providers Friday if they have questions about appointments or services.

The Provincial Health Services Authority posted the same statement to its own website Friday.

This comes after CrowdStrike confirmed disruptions occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company was working to fix problems created for Windows users of its tools by a recent update in a post on the social media platform X.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” Kurtz said. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

In a news conference Friday morning, Premier David Eby outlined the impacts on government services, which he said included the health-care system, regional emergency coordination centres, and the Ministry of Child and Family Development. These services were still operational, he added.

“There was a crack team of IT professionals who worked throughout the night on health-care IT systems to minimize impact to patients, but also the staff here — health sciences, professional doctors, the entire team that keeps the hospital running, pivoted to working on paper last night and operations went ahead as planned this morning despite the outage,” Eby shared.

“I, again, want to express my appreciation,” he said. “I suspect there are some people here who had an extraordinarily long night, and I wanted to thank all of the staff who are here, who faced the brunt of a computer outage that has struck internationally, and who spent extra time supporting patients and minimizing disruption here at VGH and across the health-care system.”

Health Minister Adrian Dix explained more than 30,500 “devices” were affected in Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health regions.

“So, it affects everything from all the dietary orders that people would get, the diagnostic systems, and lab work and scheduling,” he said.

“You then transition to more paper-based models briefly, and then that has to go back into the system, and you have to work your way through the devices. And then it’s all of our health-care workers having to adjust their daily tasks in such a way as to avoid impacts to patients, and I’m very proud of them,” Dix said.

In a statement posted online, EComm 911, the province’s emergency telephone operator, says its operations have not been affected by the Microsoft disruptions.

“9-1-1 and our emergency communications systems at E-Comm have not been impacted by the global IT outage. Services are functioning normally,” EComm said.

Premier Eby affirmed the province’s emergency operators were operating as usual. He noted he had spoken to police forces across B.C. who have not seen any disruptions to service, he said.

Eby also confirmed that the BC Wildfire Service has also not been affected by the global outage, “which is very positive news given the changing situation we’re currently in, and that it looks to get worse over the next few days.”

Eby noted that the Canada Reveue Agency-administered Child Benefit may be affected by the disruptions, and there may be delays to deposits into bank accounts.

By the early afternoon, Microsoft noted that the issue had been mitigated and that all previously impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services had recovered. However, effects from the earlier outage were still being felt throughout the world.

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