Canadian flights, hospitals, border disrupted during global technology outage

TORONTO — 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 tech company said it was gradually fixing the problem.

Tens of thousands of devices were knocked out in B.C.’s health sector, temporarily sending hospitals back to the pen-and-paper era. Provincial health authorities in Newfoundland also reported disruptions, as did several major Ontario hospitals.

Major Canadian companies, including Porter Airlines and Telus, also said operations had been affected.

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 p.m., 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, with some disruptions continuing into the evening.

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 postponed or called off.

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 observers 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.”

Not even Starbucks was spared from the fallout. The coffee chain 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 were affected by the outage before coming back online by 4:30 p.m. 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, while St. Joseph’s Healthcare said its Hamilton hospital remained open as it worked on a fix for 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, some 50,000 devices at the province’s hospitals and health facilities were put out of commission for hours, forcing staff to pivot to paper to manage everything from lab work to meal orders.

Health Minister Adrian Dix said Friday afternoon that systems were beginning to come back online after experts jumped on the problem, which had “a profound impact on staff” but a limited effect on patients.

B.C. Premier David Eby said health workers now faced the burden of transferring paper files to electronic health records.

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador advised users of its digital platforms of possible service disruptions, including to the main information system used to manage patient care and financial information at the provincial health authority.

The outage reached the border too.

The Canada Border Services Agency said its telephone reporting system — primarily used by small aircraft passengers and boaters — suffered a partial systems outage that was resolved by midday.

Earlier on Friday, Windsor police reported long delays at Canada-U.S. border crossings at both the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Meanwhile, 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.”

One major Canadian telecommunications carrier had some difficulties due to the outage.

Some Telus employees were unable to access “the tools and systems necessary to support our customers,” a spokeswoman said Friday.

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.”

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.

Shortly after noon, Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that “the issue is mitigated, and all previously impacted Microsoft 365 apps and service have recovered.”

CrowdStrike said the problem boiled down to “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.

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.”

— With files from Christopher Reynolds, Maan Alhmidi, Sharif Hassan, Sammy Hudes, Ashley Joannou and The Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 19, 2024.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press