Windows outage leads to cancelled surgeries, missed work and social media outcry

At the airport, Aguilera encountered “ridiculously long” security lines and food shortages at cafes and restaurants, which she documented in two videos she posted to TikTok. Her flight, originally scheduled to depart at 7 a.m., was delayed seven hours, just enough to get her to make it to the show.

Aguilera was one of countless people around the world caught up in a software glitch that affected Microsoft Windows users. The issue, which was caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, Airports, hospitals, transport systems and other businesses were disrupted, causing chaos and inconvenience.

“I’ve never experienced any of the things that happened this morning,” Aguilera said.

As the ripple effects of the massive IT outage spread, social media was flooded with posts from people suffering the effects. The store in New York City’s Times Square, which normally never sleeps, remained dormant.

Hospitals across the country have had to deal with a surge in canceled appointments and surgeries as equipment and medicines become harder to come by. At Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, nurse Kim Brown realized something was wrong Thursday night when the delivery room’s computer suddenly rebooted and the screen went blue. “Everything just went down,” Brown said.

With the central monitoring system gone, nurses were forced to go into each patient’s room to check the baby’s heartbeat. The digital alarm system wasn’t working, so security guards were posted at the entrance to the ward. Brown said he and his colleagues didn’t realize the extent of the problem, because the hospital’s systems had mostly come back up by midnight. “We thought it was just us,” he said.

But the scale of CrowdStrike’s outage quickly affected Providence Health & Services, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems. Providence has about 15,000 servers that run mostly on Windows, and although it eventually restored access to most of its clinical applications, as of Friday morning it had not been able to update the system that supports its anesthesia machines. The Renton, Washington-based system had to halt surgeries at more than 50 hospitals across seven states, said BJ Moore, Providence’s chief information officer.

One significant challenge remains for hospitals: It may take time for third-party vendors, such as MRI imaging equipment or blood testing labs, to apply CrowdStrike’s fix. “Other companies may not patch as quickly, so patients are still affected,” Moore says. “The blast radius of this impact is large.”

Flight monitors lit up with thousands of delays and cancellations, forcing domestic and international air travelers into long lines from Philadelphia to Singapore. In Baltimore, airport staff handed out water and cookies to exhausted travelers who had been stranded since the night before. In Dallas, a power outage forced some airport staff to write boarding passes by hand.

Andy Ruten, an American expat living in Australia, had just boarded his late-night flight from Los Angeles to Sydney when a delay notification appeared on his American Airlines app. Ruten and other passengers spent a couple of hours fidgeting on the tarmac before disembarking at about 2 a.m.

At LAX, Ruten was surprised to see “people piled up everywhere, just trying to find a place to get some rest.” He went to an airline lounge and slept on the floor for a few hours before rebooking his flight for Friday, nearly 23 hours after the original departure.

Regan Brown, 23, canceled her trip to Charlotte early Friday morning after being stuck on a Phoenix tarmac for hours. She made it onto her American Airlines flight without any issues, but was eventually forced to get off the plane after a 30-minute delay. She tried to rebook her flight or switch to another airline, but was at a loss.

“It was frustrating because the airline hadn’t given us any information about whether they could rebook us or get us somewhere,” Brown said.

As he left the airport, Brown saw dozens of people sleeping on the floor and everywhere he looked there were monitors on the walls flashing the bright “Blue Screen of Death” of the Windows operating system.

Shreya Chudasam, an associate director of data science at a telecommunications company, said she missed a deadline on Friday because her work laptop was unavailable from 8 a.m. to late afternoon. She had to limit herself to what she could get done on her work phone, texting her boss, and reviewing her team’s work through screenshots shared on Slack.

“It was really frustrating,” Chudasam said of the workaround. “If I didn’t have my work phone, I wouldn’t be able to get half of my work done.”

The power outage also hobbled the Paris Olympic Organising Committee as it continued preparations for the opening of the Games next week. The committee said in a statement on Friday that so far the impact of the outage has been “limited,” affecting “the delivery of uniforms and certificates.” It added that some delegations have experienced flight delays.

In Alaska, the power outage disrupted 911 and non-emergency services from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., forcing several call centers to switch to analog phone systems or transfer calls to partner centers, said Austin McDaniel, public information director for the Alaska Department of Public Safety.

The outage sparked a flood of social media posts from people suffering the effects of the blackout, and even triggered a wave of FOMO (fear of missing out) among some workers who had hoped the outage would give them time off.

“I just got to the office and Outlook is still working,” one user posted on X. “This is the grown-up version of it’s snowing like crazy but there’s no snow day.”

Details of the outage have not yet been released, but Microsoft and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the underlying issue was being fixed.

Lisa Bonos and Chris Dong contributed to this report.