It was half past midnight Eastern time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician who serves as Michigan Medicine’s chief information officer, suddenly realized that a significant number of computers in the medical center had stopped working, in what the hospital called a “catastrophic major incident.”
“We have pretty advanced automated monitoring of our core systems, and if they suddenly go offline we get alerts,” Rosenberg said. “We had some units where most of the computers were blue screening.”
It quickly became clear that this was no isolated incident: a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had been regularly updating its Falcon antivirus product, which is used by a variety of businesses, including banks, airlines, and hospitals. The update contained a bug. The error caused all computers running the software on Windows operating systems to crash.
Across the world, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were in a state of panic as they scrambled to deal with the effects of the largest IT outage in history. Massachusetts General Hospital Brigham, one of the largest health systems in the United States, canceled all non-urgent surgeries, procedures and consultations. In the UK, the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a major incident affecting the system that delivers radiation therapy. Canada, Germany, Israel The company said it was experiencing problems with its digital services, and 911 emergency services were reportedly down in some U.S. states. WIRED reporters found that both Baylor Hospital Network, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems, and Quest Diagnostics were unable to process routine blood tests. Phoenix Police spokeswoman Donna Rossi said: explained Although the phones were still working, the internet was not working, so officers had to be dispatched manually.
The level of disruption appears to vary both between and within health systems: “Our hospital is completely shut down by #Crowdstrike issues,” said Dana Chandler, a nurse at GBMC Healthcare in Maryland. Post to X“There’s no phones, there’s no computers, there’s no safety net. It’s an all-hands-on-deck day. We’re praying for our patients to be safe.” Michigan Medicine was up since 1 a.m. responding to the crisis, but in some units, 15 to 60 percent of the computers were not working, Rosenberg said.
“The impact is profound,” he says, “affecting every aspect of the modern digital health system. Thankfully, in units where computers are constantly on, such as the ICU or emergency department, the computers did not receive the CrowdStrike application upgrade, but in more intermittent areas of care, such as operating rooms, the disruption will be much greater.”
Rosenberg said the area of greatest disruption has been in so-called “digital bottlenecks,” which require communication between multiple computer systems. He said: Critical Practice The process of cleaning, disinfecting and sterilizing medical equipment and patient-care items, monitored through digital tools across multiple computers, ensures best practices are followed and the risk of deadly infections is minimized.
