Consider buying your IT person coffee or flowers, because they are probably having a really long day.
What happened: Computer systems across the world went down Friday when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike updated its Falcon threat detection sensor, causing Windows systems to crash. This disrupted operations at organizations including airlines, hospitals, banks, TV broadcasters, and retailers.
Why it’s happening: The incident appears to be caused by a faulty file in CrowdStrike’s update. The glitch caused Windows systems running CrowdStrike to display the dreaded “blue screen of death” after going into a boot loop — essentially, the system reboots itself after finding the error, repeating the process over and over.
- CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, but it will take time to implement it on every computer impacted.
In Canada: Companies from Telus to CBC to medical diagnostic company LifeLabs acknowledged that customers might face disruption due to the outage, but others were facing bigger headaches:
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Porter was the only Canadian airline to cancel flights, but airports told travellers to expect disruptions and busier-than-normal terminals due to issues at other airlines.
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Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services’ patient information system was affected. Ottawa’s children’s hospital and St. Joseph's in Hamilton, Ontario, as well as hospitals in Toronto’s UHN system, are affected but continuing clinical activity.
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The website Downdetector reported outages at Canada’s major banks, though TD and BMO were the two of the Big Five banks to acknowledge the disruption on their websites.
- At the border, the outage caused delays at both the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge.
How to fix it: If you are trying to get your computer running but can’t wait for CrowdStrike’s fix, you can boot your computer into Safe Mode and remove the faulty file yourself.
Why it matters: This shows how fragile global IT systems can be. With so many companies using both CrowdStrike and Windows, a small glitch with a simple fix can still cause chaos — especially when it comes to sensitive health, payment, and travel data that CrowdStrike is trusted to protect.