Global tech outage leaves a mark on Snohomish County

EVERETT — A global tech outage that disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and 911 services didn’t leave Snohomish County unscathed.

First responders, hospitals and an unknown number of other businesses and services in Snohomish County began to recover Friday from the outage.

It began Thursday night with a software update from U.S.-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Machines running Microsoft Windows crashed worldwide — disrupting millions of computer systems around the world. The resulting chaos impacted flights, 911 and health care services and bank transactions.

Providers at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett discovered the issue around 10:30 p.m. Thursday. Tech teams worked overnight, and electronic health records were back online around 1 a.m. Friday, spokesperson Erika Hermanson wrote in a statement.

“However, other clinical applications and workstations continue to be impacted,” Hermanson said. “Our IT teams are working to restore these services as soon as possible.”

Snohomish County 911 had brief trouble with emergency dispatches, said South County Fire spokesperson Christie Veley on Friday, but emergency response “continued as normal.” Firefighters used radio for dispatches instead of computer systems, she said.

“We were preparing to set up a Fire Operations Center to further assist in dispatching calls when the all-clear came,” she said.

Computer systems at the city of Everett don’t use CrowdStrike, said spokesperson Simone Tarver.

The outage did not affect Everett’s Paine Field, said airport spokesperson Kristin Banfield.

The global crash was not a security breach or cyberattack, George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, told The New York Times. He said a fix was on the way, but it could take time.

By Friday morning, services began to get back online. But many other major companies and services continued to flail with no end in sight.

Other impacts at a glance, according to The New York Times:

• Flights disrupted: U.S. airlines began restoring service Friday after at least five U.S. airlines — Allegiant Air, American, Delta, Spirit and United — had grounded all flights for a time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Travelers might not see immediate relief, however, even as flights take off because of cascading delays at airports. More than 2,000 flights across the country were canceled Friday, according to FlightAware, compared with about 900 on Thursday. But it was far from the country’s worst travel day of the year: Bad weather forced U.S. airlines to scrap more than 3,100 flights on Jan. 15.

• Global reach: The issues were also being felt at airports around the world, including in Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin and Amsterdam. In Britain, check-in machines were not working. The United Parcel Service and FedEx both reported disruptions, which could delay deliveries in the U.S. and Europe. Customers with TD Bank, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., reported issues accessing their online accounts, and several state and municipal court systems closed for the day because of the outage.

• Emergency care: The outage crippled health care systems across the globe, leading hospitals to cancel noncritical surgeries and complicating emergency response systems in the U.S., where 911 lines were down in multiple states, the U.S. Emergency Alert System said on social media. Most if not all of the 911 problems appeared to be resolving themselves by midmorning. Kaiser Permanente, a medical system that provides care to 12.6 million members in the United States, said all of its hospitals had been effected. It was unclear how long it would take for hospitals to operate at full capacity again, as they activated backup systems to keep caring for patients.

• Federal response: President Joe Biden had been briefed on the CrowdStrike outage, White House officials said. Administration officials were “in touch with CrowdStrike and impacted entities” and “engaged across the interagency to get sector by sector updates.”

• Largely unaffected: Some basic services, including major grocery store chains and public transit systems, appeared largely unaffected by the outages, at least in the U.S. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, the other major cloud-computing platforms besides Microsoft Azure, said that by and large, their services were operating normally.

The New York Times contributed to this story.

Sydney Jackson: 425-339-3430; sydney.jackson@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @_sydneyajackson.