Windows outage leads to canceled surgeries, missed work and social media outcry

Inside, Aguilera encountered “outrageously long” security lines and food shortages at the airport cafes and restaurants, which she documented in two videos posted to TikTok. Her flight — initially scheduled to depart at 7 a.m. — was delayed seven hours, giving her barely enough time to make it to the show.

Aguilera was among the countless people worldwide who were tangled by a software outage affecting Microsoft Windows users. The problem, caused by a bad update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, disrupted airports, hospitals, transportation systems and other businesses, creating a cascade of chaos and inconvenience.

“I had never experienced any of the things that happened this morning,” Aguilera said.

As the ripple effects spread from the massive IT outage, social media was flooded with posts from people grappling with the fallout. Billboard-sized screens in New York City’s ordinarily sleepless Times Square were left dormant.

The nation’s hospitals had to contend with inaccessible machinery and medicines, as well as a swell of missed appointments and canceled surgeries. At a Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Jose, nurse Kim Brown noticed something was amiss Thursday night when the computers in her labor and delivery unit abruptly restarted and the screens turned blue. “Everything just went down,” she said.

With a central monitoring system disabled, nurses had to go into patient rooms to check each baby’s heartbeat. A security guard was stationed at the entrance of the unit because the digital alarm system wasn’t working. Because the hospital’s systems were mostly restored by midnight, Brown said she and her colleague didn’t realize the scope of the problem. “We thought it was just us,” she said.

But the scale of the CrowdStrike outage set in quickly at Providence Health and Services, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health-care systems. Providence has almost 15,000 servers running primarily on Windows, and although it eventually restored access to most of its clinical applications, it hadn’t been able to update systems that support anesthesia machines as of Friday morning. The Renton, Wash.-based system had to cancel surgeries at its 50-plus hospitals across seven states, said B.J. Moore, Providence’s chief information officer. A Providence spokesperson later said fewer hospitals were impacted than originally thought, and the elective procedures will be rescheduled.

One crucial lingering challenge for hospitals: Third-party vendors such as MRI image processors and blood-testing labs may take longer to apply the CrowdStrike fixes. “Patients are still impacted because other companies may not be remediated this quickly,” Moore said. “The blast radius of this impact is big.”

Airline travelers, both domestic and international, faced serpentine lines from Philadelphia to Singapore as flight monitors lit up with thousands of delay and cancellation notices. In Baltimore, airport staff served water and cookies to exhausted travelers who had been stuck since the previous night. In Dallas, the outage forced some airport workers to draft boarding passes by hand.

Andy Luten, an American expat living in Australia, had just boarded his red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Sydney when a delay notification flashed on his American Airlines app. He and his fellow passengers spent a couple of antsy hours on the tarmac before getting off the plane around 2 a.m.

Inside the Los Angeles airport, Luten was struck by the “heaps of people all over, finding whatever free space to get some rest.” He got as far as the airline lounge, sleeping on the floor for a few fitful hours before rebooking his flight for Friday, nearly 23 hours after his original trip.

Regan Brown, 23, canceled her trip to Charlotte after an hours-long wait on the tarmac early Friday in Phoenix. Though she made it onto her American Airlines flight shortly before midnight without issue, several 30-minute delays eventually forced her to deplane around 2:30 a.m. She attempted to rebook her flight or switch to another airline but found herself at a loss.

“It was frustrating because they didn’t have any information for us about whether or not they would be able to rebook us or get us anywhere,” Brown said.

As she left the airport, Brown saw dozens of people sleeping on the floor, while the monitors on the wall glowed with the Windows operating system’s bright “blue screen of death” everywhere she looked.

Shreya Chudasam, associate director of data science for a telecom company, said she missed a Friday deadline because her work laptop was unusable from 8 a.m. until well into the afternoon. She had to limit herself to what she could complete on her work phone, texting with her boss and reviewing her team’s work through screenshots shared on Slack.

“It was definitely frustrating,” Chudasam said of her workarounds. “If the work phone wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have gotten done half of the things.”

Even the Paris Olympics organizing committee found itself waylaid by the outage as it continued preparations for the kickoff of the Games next week. The outage has had a “limited” impact so far, the panel said in a statement Friday, affecting “the delivery of uniforms and accreditations.” Some delegations were experiencing flight delays, it added.

In Alaska, multiple dispatch centers were forced to switch to analog phone systems or refer calls to partner centers as the outage hampered 911 and non-emergency call services from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., according to Austin McDaniel, communications director for the Alaska Department of Public Safety.

The outage ushered in posts on social media from people grappling with the fallout, even inspiring waves of FOMO — fear of missing out — in some workers who had hoped the disruptions might net them some time off.

“Got to the office and my Outlook still works,” one user posted on X. “This is the adult version of it snowing really hard but you still don’t get a snow day.”

Though outage details are still emerging, Microsoft and CrowdStrike said the underlying problems were being repaired.

Lisa Bonos and Chris Dong contributed to this report.