PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Organizations across the world are scrambling to recover from a Microsoft outage that rendered many systems inoperable Friday morning.
The outage has been traced back to a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, which provides anti-cyberattack services to Microsoft and other large companies.
Central Pennsylvania was hit just as hard as the rest of the globe, with organizations from banks to city governments to hospitals facing difficulties carrying out their daily operations.
WellSpan and UPMC say they are still open to patients while they deal with periodic outages and restore servers.
"Like many organizations worldwide, WellSpan is experiencing sporadic IT disruptions related to the CrowdStrike outage," a spokesperson said. "We remain open for patient care and our IT professionals are working diligently to implement a fix to affected computers. WellSpan Health is committed to providing safe, reliable, high-quality care, and we are working quickly to address this issue."
A UPMC spokesperson says the healthcare provider is proceeding with business as usual:
UPMC has been impacted by the worldwide CrowdStrike cybersecurity outage affecting fewer than 10% of our Microsoft Windows-based devices at some of our facilities. UPMC’s IT team intervened early to mitigate the problem and is restoring servers and PCs.
Patient care has not been affected and our facilities are operational. Our emergency departments are open and appointments and procedures will proceed as scheduled.
Penn State Health says it does not use Crowdstrike, but some of its vendors do.
"As a result, we are seeing minimal impact, mostly across retail and administrative functions at this time," a spokesperson said. "Patient care, including clinic appointments and medical and surgical procedures, is continuing without interruption."
According to a Facebook post from the City of Harrisburg, some city services like the treasury, codes and mercantile are unavailable. Officials say they are working to address the issue as quickly as possible and thank residents for their patience.
Flights across the country were grounded, including at Harrisburg International Airport and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where customers waited in long lines to find out their next steps.
Some airlines have started to resume flights, but other carriers are still working to get their systems back online and residual delays remain.
In a statement, Crowdstrike's CEO said a fix is being deployed and the issues are not related to a cyberattack.