IT departments around the world are still dealing with the aftermath of yesterday’s outage, which put “blue screen of death” messages on 8.5 million computers worldwide, according to Microsoft.
Island Health was one of the systems affected.
In a statement yesterday the health authority said a contingency plan is in place to ensure patient care isn’t disrupted. Significant work continues this weekend to bring impacted systems and devices back on-line.
Provincial Health Minister Adrian Dix issued a statement Friday afternoon.
“Our primary concern is the continuity and quality of patient care. We have implemented contingency plans to ensure that our health-care services remain operational and that patient care is not disrupted to the best of our ability,” he said. “Staff at the Provincial Health Services Authority remain in contact with Crowdstrike, a global cybersecurity firm used by organizations around the world that generated this outage, to discuss solutions. Further investigations are underway to assess the extent of the disruption and a provincial emergency operations centre was activated to assess and mitigate impacts.
“I would like to thank the health-care workers and everyone who has been working on this disruption overnight. An initial group of IT staff were deployed in the early hours of Friday, July 19, 2024, to health-authority-owned facilities to provide IT support and more are on the way.
“During this period, there may be some impacts to our staffing systems, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience caused by unplanned service interruptions that may occur.”
If you have any questions about an appointment they encourage you to call your healthcare providers directly.
The worldwide outage was caused by a faulty update sent out by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, whose software is used by businesses and governments around the world.
A fix was issued yesterday, but some systems will require manual repairs and impacts continue.
