This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Microsoft Windows crashed globally Friday morning due to cybersecurity issues, causing problems in a variety of industries including health care, travel and business. The outage created flight disruptions for major airlines in India and Latin America, and has resulted in more than 3,300 flight cancellations worldwide. In Michigan, hospitals are facing software difficulties, including large hospital systems such as Corewell Health, a result of the merger between Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health, and Michigan Medicine, delaying procedures and appointments for patients.
In an email to the University of Michigan community, Ravi Pendse, U-M vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said the global outage is affecting U-M operations, but it is quickly being fixed.
“All Health Information Technology resources are fully dedicated to restoring full functionality as quickly as possible,” Pendse wrote. “Some faculty, staff, and units using Windows may be experiencing issues with logging into their computers this morning.”
In a statement from Michigan Medicine, Mary Masson, director of public relations for Michigan Medicine, said the U-M health system will continue to operate despite disruptions caused by the outage.
“There may be delays in trying to connect with our services,” Masson wrote. “Operations are continuing, and we are not canceling procedures or appointments at this time.”
It is believed that the cybersecurity breach was triggered by an update by the American cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike, which has resulted in a “Blue Screen of Death” prohibiting operating systems from carrying out routine functions.
In an interview Friday morning with NBC TODAY, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that the outage has been identified and measures are being taken to ensure that the problem is fixed.
“We know what the issue is,” Kurtz said. “We are resolving and have resolved the issue, now it is recovering systems that are out there. … Essentially, as you have talked about and in the statement I put out … the system was sent an update, that update had a software bug in it and it caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system. We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue and as systems come back online and are rebooted they are coming up and they are working.”
Kurtz said the technological failure was a result of a software update and not a cyberattack.
“It wasn’t a cyberattack,” Kurtz said. “It was related to this content update. As you might imagine, we have been with our customers all night and working with them. Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it will be operational because we fixed it on our end.”
Summer Managing News Editor Ellen Drejza can be reached at edrejza@umich.edu.
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