A widespread global tech outage did not spare the Bay Area, causing havoc Friday morning at major airports, regional health care facilities and court systems.
The outage — caused by a faulty update from a widely used cybersecurity firm — hit the region’s airports especially hard. Over 100 Friday morning flights were canceled at San Francisco International Airport, Mineta San Jose International Airport and San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. Thousands of people were forced to re-book early morning flights while others continued to wait in crowded airports for their regularly scheduled flights.
While remaining open to patient care, the outage affected Kaiser Permanente, John Muir Health and other major Bay Area health care systems. Several court systems also warned people using court services to expect significant delays but remained open.
The global tech outage followed an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, not hacking or a cyberattack, the Associated Press reported. The update caused widespread impacts for customers and networks running Microsoft Windows programs.
At SFO, the outage caused 83 flight cancellations and 136 delays before 9:30 a.m., according to flight-tracking company FlightAware. While the airport and its major airlines restored their affected systems by Friday afternoon, flights continued to experience residual delays, San Francisco Airport spokesperson Doug Yakel told the Bay Area News Group.
Rheannon Hoey spent the night curled up in a restaurant booth at SFO after her red-eye to Australia was canceled. Her plane sat on the runway for almost two hours before flight attendants finally told everyone to return to the gate.
“Then boom — it was all flights are canceled, go get your baggage,” said Howey, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the airplane terminal the next morning while waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up and return to her home in Sacramento.
At baggage claim, Rosemary Del Toro was checking tags on the hundreds of suitcases lined up in rows by the baggage carousels, hoping to find the bag containing her medication.
Del Toro, who lives in Dublin, is battling advanced pancreatic cancer. She said she won’t be able to reschedule her family vacation to Cancun because she’s set to start chemotherapy next week. “My aunts are pretty upset, my kids are tired, and my mom, she’s an emotional wreck with all of this,” Del Toro said.
The San Jose and Oakland airports — which handle far fewer passengers than SFO — suffered less impact. San Jose saw 13 canceled flights and 48 delayed, while Oakland saw seven canceled and 41 delayed, according to FlightAware.
Meanwhile, medical centers grappled with the outage as well. Kaiser Permanente hospitals and medical offices remained open to patients, but the health care system — which serves more than 4.5 million patients in Northern California — was still working to restore several affected systems, a Kaiser spokesperson said Friday. Kaiser Permanente operates 21 hospitals and 206 medical offices across the northern part of the Golden State. The health care provider activated its national command center early Friday to coordinate recovery. Kaiser also activated backup systems to ensure there were no disruptions to patient care and secure medical records.
John Muir Health — which operates two major medical centers in Contra Costa County — saw issues with its administrative systems, including its employee timekeeping system, Kronos, according to spokesperson Ben Drew.
The outage also created problems for Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, but the center remained open for patient care, the county confirmed.
Around the region, court systems were also affected by the outage. The Superior Court of Alameda County suffered blows to its case management systems, the court said in a statement, warning people to expect delays while staff members restored the systems. The court remained open, and anyone scheduled to appear in court was still required to show up.
Santa Clara County’s Superior Court also experienced disruptions to desktop devices in all of its courthouses, according to a court press release. The Information Technology Team worked overnight to restore the court’s systems and prioritized courtrooms with morning calendars to minimize disruptions and ensure that “critical court functions continue smoothly.” In San Mateo County, the Superior Court was experiencing “residual impacts” Friday, according to Dan Radovich, a communications officer. And the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office was working to resolve impacts to its network systems. The DA’s office remained open.
A multitude of banks, television stations, businesses and government offices worldwide felt the effects of the outage. Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to requests for comment about any impact on Bay Area customers.
The global outage arose from consolidation in the technology industry, said Shomit Ghose, a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s engineering school and a partner at Clearvision Ventures, a Menlo Park venture capital firm.
CrowdStrike’s update caused failures in Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, Ghose explained. Organizations like airlines, hospitals and courts who use Windows and CrowdStrike’s “Falcon” cybersecurity sensor thus experienced crashes following the update.
Because a few large companies dominate the global technology industry, a problem at one can produce a widespread impact, Ghose said.
“This is a symptom of what happens when we have consolidation when we just have a few players,” Ghose said. “Imagine if Gmail went down: The entire planet gets affected. Back in the old days, every company had their own mail server.”
Ethan Baron, Ethan Varian, Rick Hurd, Nollyanne Delacruz, Caelyn Pender and Nate Gartrell contributed to this report.
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