A global technology outage grounded flights and impacted services at hospitals Friday morning in Ottawa.
Porter Airlines it’s cancelling its flights until 3 p.m. It had 13 flights scheduled to depart Ottawa Friday morning. The airline adds that it’s working to return to full service as soon as possible. It asks passengers to visit Porter’s website for more information and updates.
There are several delays and cancellations this morning, said the Ottawa International Airport on X, while asking passengers to check with their airlines for the most up-to-date information. Krista Kealey, director of communications and public affairs.at the Ottawa Airport told CFRA’s The Morning Rush with Bill Carroll though not all Canadian airlines have been affected by the outage, some international flights were impacted.
“There are definitely a couple of people around from Porter who are waiting to find what’s going on. There were a couple of lineups there, but again their staff is trying to help them,” Kealey said.
The cancellations also included a United Airlines flight to Newark, which was scheduled to depart Ottawa this morning.
The issue with Microsoft services hit at least two Ottawa hospitals.
CHEO said in a statement Friday it continues to operate despite the Crowdstrike global outage.
“While CHEO has been affected by the Crowdstrike global outage, we are providing services as planned using workarounds where needed. We do not anticipate any impact on our services offered to children and their families today,” reads the statement.
The Queensway-Carleton Hospital (QCH) says it was impacted by the CrowdStrike issue between 1:30 and 5:45 a.m., but the system has since been restored.
“During that time, we experienced an outage of our health record system. Staff moved to our established downtime procedures,” QCH said in a statement on X. “There are no impacts to planned surgeries and appointments.”
Friday’s outage also knocked banks offline and media outlets off the air. The outage caused a massive disruption, affecting companies and services around the world and in the capital, highlighting dependence on software from a handful of providers.
Card payments were not working this morning at Starbucks and other businesses. Some people reported delays in receiving their paycheques this Friday, as well.
Lack of infrastructure to fix things bigger issue: Expert
Technology expert Ritesh Kotak told CFRA’s The Morning Rush with Bill Carroll the outages themselves aren’t the only problem. He says the bigger issue is the lack of infrastructure to fix things when they break.
“One thing that we’ve learnt is that these outages are gonna continue to happen. They’re becoming larger and more frequent, but we don’t have the systems in place to deal with it when the lights get turned off,” he said. “And that to me is even scarier than when a software has gone wrong.”
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing it.
More to come