2024-07-23
8 分钟Doctors find themselves without critical systems and diagnostic tools—and face the daunting reality that a full recovery could take days—after CrowdStrike’s botched deployment of a software update.
Today, in science from wired, hospitals around the world are struggling in the aftermath of the great it meltdown.
Doctors find themselves without critical systems and diagnostic tools and face the daunting reality that a full recovery could take.
Days after Crowdstrike's botched deployment of a software update by David Cox it was half past midnight, eastern Standard Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor who works as chief information officer officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a substantial number of computers across the healthcare center had ceased to function.
In the hospital's parlance, it counted as a catastrophic major incident.
We do some fairly sophisticated automatic monitoring of our core systems, and when those suddenly went offline, that triggered alerts, says Rosenberg.
In a couple of our units, the majority of their computers all had the blue screen of death.
It soon became clear that this was not an isolated incident.
A cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike had made a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, utilized by companies ranging from banks to airlines to hospitals.
That update contained a bug, an error that caused all computers running the software on a windows operating system to crash around the globe.
Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were going into panic mode as they raced to manage the consequences of the largest it outage in history.
Mass General Brigham, one of Americas biggest healthcare systems, canceled all non urgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits.
In the UK, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident affecting the systems used to deliver radiotherapy treatments.
Hospitals in Canada, Germany and Israel announced issues with their digital services, while the 911 emergency service in some us states was reported to be down.
A Wired reporter found both Baylor Hospital network, one of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in the country, and quest diagnostics unable to process routine blood work.
Donna Rossi, a spokesperson at the Phoenix Police Department, explained that while calls were still going through, the lack of working Internet meant that officers had to be dispatched manually.
The extent of the disruption appeared to vary both between and within healthcare systems.
Our hospital is fully down due to hash crowdstrikeissue Dana Chandler, a nurse at GBMC Healthcare, posted on x no phones, no computers, no safety nets.
Its an all hands on deck kind of day.
I hope our patients remain safe.
Rosenberg says that at Michigan Medicine, where he was awake since 01:00 a.m.