Island Health asked the public not to call hospitals Friday as it dealt with issues stemming from a global technology outage that grounded flights, disrupted hospitals and backed up border crossings in Canada.
A statement on the health authority’s website said it had implemented contingency plans to ensure that health-care services remain operational and patient care is not disrupted “to the best of our ability.”
Patients were also advised to direct any questions about Friday appointments to their health-care providers.
Health Minister Adrian Dix said about 50,000 devices at hospitals around the province were affected by the outage, forcing hospital staff to return to using paper to manage everything from lab work to meal orders.
He said experts began immediately working on the problem, which affected computers running Microsoft Windows.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the glitch occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running 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 technology company said it was fixing the problem.
Dix said the outage had “a profound impact on staff” but they did everything possible to limit the impact on patients.
“Say you’re opening an urgent and primary care centre at eight in the morning, and your systems are affected. You have to adapt and then try and keep it as normal as possible,” he said.
“I know there are urgent primary care centres that were delayed in taking their first patients by about seven minutes this morning, which shows the dedication of the staff [and] how quickly they moved.”
He said Friday afternoon that systems were beginning to come back online after experts jumped on the problem.
B.C. Premier David Eby said information put on paper will need to be inputted into the electronic health records of hospitals and care facilities across the province, which “can be a fair bit of work.”
Eby said staff at the Provincial Health Services Authority were in contact with CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm used by organizations around the world, to discuss solutions.
He said there was no impact on the provincial wildfire service, 911, or any of the province’s police departments, but the call centre at the Ministry of Children and Family Development was experiencing some slowdowns.
Eby said people might be delayed in getting their B.C. family benefits, which are administered by the Canada Revenue Agency and delivered monthly along with the Canada child benefit.
At Victoria International Airport, the only flight disruption by noon was a cancellation by Porter Airlines out of Toronto, said spokesperson Rod Hunchak.
The airport advised passengers worried they could be affected to check with their airline for flight updates.
Porter Airlines, which initially grounded flights until noon, extended cancellations until 3 p.m. EDT due to the outage. By 12:30 p.m., the country’s third-largest airline had scrapped 56 flights, or 26 per cent of its 212 scheduled takeoffs, according to aviation data firm Cirium.
More than 7,000 customers were affected, and its website was down until mid-afternoon, with some disruptions continuing into the evening.
Officials at Vancouver’s airport said that while its IT systems were not affected by the outage, airlines were forced to adjust their schedules.
A statement from the airport said about 20 per cent of flights were delayed arriving on Friday between 5 a.m. and noon and about 28 per cent were delayed taking off.
The statement said the average delay was less than 50 minutes.
The Capital Regional District initially posted on social media that its computer systems were affected, but later issued a statement saying the problems had been resolved. “The impact was primarily confined to internal systems which our teams worked quickly to restore,” the CRD said.
A statement from B.C. Ferries said its computers were running normally.
Major Canadian companies, including Porter Airlines and Telus, said their operations had been affected.
The Canada Border Services Agency said its telephone reporting system — primarily used by small aircraft passengers and boaters — suffered a partial systems outage that was resolved by midday.
Meanwhile, banks in Canada were “reviewing the situation based on updates from their technology partners,” a spokeswoman for the Canadian Bankers Association said.
“Any current impacts on banking services would be temporary,” Maggie Cheung said in a statement.
Canada Post said a small number of post offices across the country appeared to be affected by the outage, calling the impact to customers “minimal.”
Vancouver Island University computer science professor Luis Meneses said computer problems might linger for a few days — he said he was in a store Friday afternoon that wasn’t able to take debit payments in some cases.
“It’s going to have some repercussions, I think, for the next couple of days at least,” he said. “The problem is that we’re living in a world that is very dependent on computers and technology.”
Meneses said it’s unusual for the problem to happen when it did because “there is an unspoken rule in software development that critical updates should not be applied on a Friday,” since there are fewer people around to deal with problems on weekends.
“So it must have been some big flaw that they needed to patch urgently.”
At Pearson airport in Toronto, as well as the main airports in Calgary and Montreal, the vast majority of arrivals and departures between Canada and the U.S. were postponed or called off.
Passengers at Pearson saw early morning departures to cities including Houston, Denver and Washington, D.C., delayed for up to five hours. Flights from Chicago and Newark, N.J., were cancelled.
Not even Starbucks was spared from the fallout. The coffee chain said its mobile order-ahead and pay features were temporarily out of order.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” traveller Robert Harris said in a social media post from Pearson, “the ground stoppage or the fact that the Starbucks order ahead isn’t working. Both are causing massive lines.”
