B.C. hospitals, health services affected by global IT outage
CTV
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said the outage affected approximately 50,000 electronic devices across the health ministry, including 30,000 on the B.C. mainland and another 20,000 on Vancouver Island.
British Columbia's health-care system faced disruptions Friday as a global technology outage affected multiple industries and government agencies around the world.
The widespread disruption was attributed to a faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that was affecting computers running Microsoft Windows.
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said the outage affected approximately 50,000 electronic devices across the health ministry, including 30,000 on the B.C. mainland and another 20,000 on Vancouver Island.
The province's five regional health authorities in issued statements saying the outage was "impacting our networks and computers across all systems."
The health authorities said contingency plans were in place to ensure hospitals and other health-care services remain open and "that patient care is not disrupted to the best of our ability."
The statements urged patients not to call hospital switchboards until the problem was resolved.
Sources tell CTV News the issue started late Thursday night, and affected the ability of some health-care providers to treat patients.
