It was 3:30 p.m. Eastern time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician who serves as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a significant number of computers throughout the health care facility had stopped working. In hospital jargon, it was considered a “catastrophic major incident.”
“We had pretty sophisticated automated monitoring of our core systems, and when they suddenly went down, we would trigger alerts,” Rosenberg says. “At several of our facilities, most of the computers had a blue screen of death.”
It soon became clear that this was not an isolated incident. A cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike had performed a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, used by companies from banks to airlines to hospitals. The update contained a bug that caused all computers running the software to crash on Windows.
Around the world, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were panicking as they raced to cope with the worst IT outage in history. Mass General Brigham, one of the largest US health systems, canceled all non-urgent surgeries, procedures and medical appointments. In the UK, the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident affecting systems used to deliver radiotherapy. Hospitals in Canada, Germany and Israel reported problems with its digital services, while 911 emergency services in some U.S. states were reported as unavailable. A WIRED reporter found that the Baylor hospital chain, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the country, and Quest Diagnostics were unable to process routine blood tests. Donna Rossi, spokeswoman for the Phoenix Police Department, he explained that Although calls were still going through, the lack of working internet meant officers had to be dispatched manually.
The extent of disruptions seemed to vary both between and within health systems. “Our hospital is completely shut down because of the #Crowdstrike issue,” said Dana Chandler, a nurse at GBMC HealthCare in Maryland, published on X“No phones, no computers, no safety nets. This is an all-hands-on-deck day. I hope our patients stay safe.” Rosenberg says that at Michigan Medicine, where he was up from 1 a.m. dealing with the crisis, between 15 percent and 60 percent of computers were down, depending on the department.
“The impact is enormous,” he says. “It affects every aspect of modern healthcare systems. Fortunately, in departments where computers are always running, such as intensive care units and emergency departments, computers have not received the CrowdStrike app update, whereas in areas of healthcare that are more episodic, such as operating rooms, the disruption is much greater.”
Rosenberg says the areas of greatest disruption are so-called “digital bottlenecks,” which require multiple computer systems to communicate. He cites an example critical practice cleaning, disinfecting, and sterilizing medical devices and patient care supplies. This is monitored using digital tools on multiple computers to ensure best practices are followed and to minimize the risk of potentially fatal infections.