Maryland hospitals take preventative measures, courts close over Microsoft outage

BALTIMORE -- The Maryland Judiciary closed all courts to the public Friday, except for emergencies, due to a Microsoft outage that has crippled systems worldwide. Hospitals are also among the systems impacted. 

The issue was caused by a technical problem that global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said it had identified in its software and was working to resolve, CBS News reports. CrowdStrike provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices.

"The underlying cause has been fixed, however, residual impact is continuing to affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services. We're conducting additional mitigations to provide relief," Microsoft said in a statement posted on social media.

Multiple hospitals impacted by outage

WJZ reached out to five major Baltimore-area health systems -- Johns Hopkins University Medicine, Mercy Medical Center, MedStar Health, the University of Maryland Medical System and LifeBridge Health --to determine the outage's impact.

Johns Hopkins and MedStar said they are not experiencing any outages, while Mercy said it has taken steps to ensure normal operations. UMMS said it has implemented downtime procedures to ensure orderly operations. 

LifeBridge Health said it has activated a systemwide command center to manage the outage, which is affecting the system's  computers "at various levels across our health system"

Sinai Hospital, Northwest Hospital and Carroll Hospital each opened command centers to manage operations, LifeBridge said, which includes rescheduling non-urgent procedures and surgeries at Sinai.

While hospitals work to moderate any impact the outages may cause, major delays plague BWI, with multiple flight delays and cancellations sweeping the country.