Rosemary del Toro, a Dublin native who has advanced pancreatic cancer, searches for her luggage containing medication after spending the night at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California, on Friday, July 19, 2024. Del Toro’s flight to Cancun was canceled due to a global technology outage that also affected banks, hospitals, courts and businesses around the world. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The Bay Area was not spared from the widespread global technology outage, causing chaos at major airports, local medical facilities and courthouses on Friday morning.
Power outage — The flawed update, which was brought about by a widely used cybersecurity firm, hit area airports particularly hard, with more than 100 flights canceled Friday morning at San Francisco International Airport, Mineta San Jose International Airport and Mineta San Jose International Airport. San Francisco Bay-Oakland International Airport was also closed, forcing thousands of people to rebook for early morning flights while others continued to wait in congested airports for scheduled flights.
Patient care continued, but the outage affected Kaiser Permanente, John Muir Health and other major health systems in the Bay Area. Several court systems also warned people who use court services to expect significant delays, but continued to operate.
The Associated Press reported that the global technology outage was not the result of a hack or cyberattack, but rather an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that had widespread effects on customers and networks running Microsoft Windows programs.
At San Francisco International Airport, the outage caused 83 flights to be canceled and 136 to be delayed by 9:30 a.m., according to flight-tracking company FlightAware. The airport and major airlines had restored affected systems by Friday afternoon, but flights continued to be delayed, San Francisco airport spokesman Doug Yakel told the Bay Area News Group.
Rhiannon Hoey spent the night curled up in a restaurant booth at San Francisco International Airport after her late-night flight to Australia was canceled. Her plane remained on the tarmac for nearly two hours before a flight attendant finally told everyone to return to the gate.
“Then all of a sudden I got a message saying all flights were canceled and I should go get my luggage,” Howie said the next morning, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the airport terminal, waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up and take her back to her home in Sacramento.
At baggage claim, Rosemary Del Toro was checking the tags on hundreds of suitcases lined up on the carousel, hoping to find the bag containing her medication.
Mr Del Toro, who lives in Dublin, is battling advanced pancreatic cancer and is due to start chemotherapy next week, meaning he can’t replan a family trip to Cancun. “My aunts are pretty upset, my kids are exhausted and my mum is just overwhelmed by all of this,” he said.
San Jose and Oakland airports, which handle far fewer passengers than SFO, were less affected: San Jose saw 13 cancellations and 48 delays, while Oakland saw seven cancellations and 41 delays, according to FlightAware.
Meanwhile, medical centers also suffered power outages. Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics continued to accept patients, but the health system, which serves more than 4.5 million patients in Northern California, continued to work to restore some affected systems, a Kaiser spokesman said Friday. Kaiser Permanente runs 21 hospitals and 206 clinics in Northern California. The health care provider activated a national command center early Friday to coordinate restoration efforts. Kaiser also activated backup systems to ensure patient care was not interrupted and medical records were safe.
John Muir Health, which runs two major medical centers in Contra Costa County, said the company had issues with its management systems, including its employee time-keeping system, Kronos.
The outage also caused issues at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, but the center remained open to treat patients, the county confirmed.
Court systems across the region were also affected by the outage. The Alameda County Superior Court said in a statement that its case management system was hit and warned people to expect delays while officials restored the system. Courts remained open and people scheduled to appear in court were required to show up.
Santa Clara County Superior Court also experienced an outage on desktop devices at all courthouses, according to a court press release. Information technology teams worked overnight to restore court systems and prioritized courtrooms in the morning calendar to minimize disruptions and allow “critical court functions to continue smoothly.” In San Mateo County, the Superior Court experienced “residual impacts” on Friday, according to Communications Officer Dan Radovich, and the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office is working to resolve the impact to its network systems. The District Attorney’s Office remained open.
Many banks, television stations, businesses and government agencies around the world were affected by the outage. Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the impact on their Bay Area customers.
Shomit Ghose, a lecturer in the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Engineering and a partner at Menlo Park venture capital firm ClearVision Ventures, said the global bottlenecks have been caused by consolidation in the tech industry.
The CrowdStrike update caused a glitch in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Ghose explained, which caused airlines, hospitals, courts and other organisations that use Windows and CrowdStrike’s “Falcon” cybersecurity sensor to experience crashes after the update.
Ghose noted that the global technology industry is dominated by a few large companies, so problems at one company can have widespread repercussions.
“This is a sign of what happens when you consolidate when you only have a few players,” Ghose says. “Imagine what would happen if Gmail went down. The whole planet would be affected. In the old days, every company had their own email servers.”
Ethan Baron, Ethan Varian, Rick Hurd, Norean DelaCruz, Kerrin Pender and Nate Gartrell contributed to this report.
