It was 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician who works as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly realized that a significant number of computers across the healthcare facility had stopped working. In hospital jargon, this was a “major catastrophic incident.”
“We had a fairly sophisticated automated monitoring of our core systems, and when they suddenly went offline, alerts would go off,” Rosenberg says. “On a couple of our units, most of the computers would go to the blue screen of death.”
It soon became clear that this was no isolated incident. A cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike had issued a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, used by companies ranging from banks to airlines to hospitals. That update contained a bug that caused all computers running the software on a Windows operating system to stop working.
Around the world, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators panicked as they scrambled to manage the fallout from the largest IT disruption in history. Mass General Brigham, one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States, cancelled all non-urgent surgeries, procedures and doctor visits. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident affecting systems used to deliver radiation therapy treatments. Hospitals in Canada, Germany and Israel Phoenix emergency services reported problems with their digital services, while 911 emergency services in some US states were down. A WIRED reporter found that both the Baylor hospital network, one of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in the country, and Quest Diagnostics were unable to process routine blood tests. Donna Rossi, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department, explained that Although calls continued to be made, the lack of internet meant officers had to be dispatched manually.
The scope of the disruption appeared to vary both across and within health care systems. “Our hospital is totally shut down due to a #TownStrike issue,” said Dana Chandler, a nurse at GBMC HealthCare in Maryland. published in X“There are no phones, no computers, no safety nets. It’s a day when everyone has to work. I hope our patients are safe.” Rosenberg says that at Michigan Medicine, where he was up since 1 a.m. dealing with the crisis, between 15 and 60 percent of computers were down, depending on the unit.
“The impact is huge,” he says. “It affects every aspect of modern digital healthcare systems. Fortunately, in units where computers are running all the time, such as ICUs and emergency departments, the computers were not updated with the CrowdStrike application, whereas in areas of healthcare that are more episodic, such as operating theatres, the disruption is much greater.”
Rosenberg says the areas of greatest disruption have been so-called “digital bottlenecks,” which require communication between multiple computer systems. He gives the example of the critical practice cleaning, disinfecting and sterilizing medical devices and patient care supplies. This is monitored through digital tools on multiple computers, to ensure best practices are followed and the risk of potentially lethal infections is minimized.