A global IT outage had little impact on healthcare services in Alberta.
That’s coming from Alberta Health Services (AHS) in response to the major CrowdStrike outage that began Thursday night.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the glitch felt around 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.
Major Canadian companies, including Porter Airlines and TELUS, said their operations had been affected.
TELUS said some of its employees were unable to access "the tools and systems necessary to support our customers." The company was working with "the utmost urgency" to get the systems working again.
University Health Network, one of Canada's largest hospital networks, said some of its systems had been impacted by the outage.
In a statement, AHS said there was no direct impact on patient care or core clinical systems related to the outage.
However, AHS said the outage did affect TELUS, which is used for EMS dispatch. Workarounds were implemented to allow dispatches to continue, and all issues were resolved Friday morning.
Physician dictation systems did experience some issues because of the CrowdStrike glitch but that did not impact patient care.
Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was "working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
-With files from The Canadian Press