Day of disruptions, dashed plans for many Canadians after global tech outage

Canadians weren't spared the headaches of cancelled flights, delayed medical appointments and other problems caused by a failed cybersecurity software upgrade that caused a host of cascading issues around the globe on Friday.

According to an alert sent by the global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company's Falcon Sensor software caused Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the "blue screen of death."

The problem crashed Windows machines and servers, sending them into a loop of recovery so that they couldn't restart.

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," company CEO George Kurtz said in a message posted on social media.

"Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

David Shipley, CEO of cybersecurity firm Beauceron Security, said a majority of the world's computers use Windows systems, and that is a vulnerability that Canada and other governments should think about addressing.

"Maybe we need to have a deep conversation about where government's role is in regulating tech companies to make sure all of our eggs — in every single critical industry — are not concentrated in so few companies," Shipley told CBC News.

Canadian airlines, business, government agencies, hospitals and media outlets — including CBC — suffered the effects of the outage, which began overnight. 

British Columbia health authorities say the disruption affected its networks and computers across all systems. Adrian Dix, the province's health minister, said that the tech issues left hospital workers "briefly" using pen and paper to do some tasks on Friday. 

Hospitals in the Ontario cities of Toronto and Hamilton also dealt with some issues related to the outage, which affected the availability of some health-care services in Newfoundland and Labrador as well.

Airports across Canada advised customers to check with airlines about flight status before leaving home Friday.

Toronto-based Porter Airlines said all flights would be cancelled until at least 3 p.m. ET. The airline reported being in the "early stages" of restoring normal services by Friday afternoon.

Porter customer Jennifer Quintyne told CBC News that she was supposed to be headed east with her son to visit family, but instead found herself "vacationing at the airport."

The flight issues caused serious consequences in some cases.