Southern California hospitals impacted by worldwide software outage

Southern California hospitals have been impacted by the global software outage as they turn to backup systems and launch other emergency efforts to get patients the care they need.

The outage caused by a flawed security update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike resulted in crashed Microsoft Windows systems around the world, leading to grounded flights and impacts on banks and a wide range of businesses. It all started Thursday night and IT professionals around the world worked through Friday morning to get things up and running again.

But healthcare systems have also been affected with doctors in the U.K. dealing with issues like trying to access their online booking systems and hospitals in Germany saying they were canceling elective surgeries Friday. 

In Southern California, a number of healthcare companies each overseeing dozens of hospitals said they were impacted.

Providence Health & Services — which operates 11 hospitals across Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties — dispatched IT teams to work through the night to restore functioning of its medical records system, said Patricia Aidem, director of public relations for Providence Southern California.

"Our IT teams have been working overnight to respond to the issue and have restored key functionality in the Epic electronic health record so that nurses, physicians and other caregivers can access patient records and perform clinical documentation," Aidem said in a written statement. 

"However, other clinical applications and workstations continue to be impacted, and our IT teams are working to restore these services as soon as possible," she said. "Patient safety and access to care is always the top priority at Providence."

Some software systems were also affected at Kaiser Permanente, which runs 16 hospitals and 197 medical offices across Southern California. All its hospitals are open and running but the company continues to monitor the situation after launching efforts to resolve the issue early Friday, even turning to backup systems in some cases, according to Terry Kanakri, a spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente in the Southern California region.

"We activated our national command center at 4:30 a.m. PT to address this incident, evaluate the impacts to our care operations, computer systems and servers, and coordinate recovery as needed," Kanakri said in a statement. "In some situations, we have activated backup systems to support both continuous patient care and to secure access to medical records."

Meanwhile, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles was also dealing with the massive outage while keeping facilities open.

"We are actively working to address the issue and minimize any impacts," Marni Usheroff, a spokesperson for the hospital, said in a written statement. "We thank our patients and our staff for their flexibility during this unexpected event."

Dignity Health, which operates eight hospitals in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, has had some of its facilities affected as well and a spokesperson for the company said in a statement that it took "immediate action."

"Like many other organizations and industries, some facilities within Dignity Health have been affected by the global IT outage affecting computer systems caused by a third party software update," the statement reads. "We continue to provide safe, high-quality care to our patients and thank everyone for their patience as our teams take immediate action to restore any impacted systems."

On a national level, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Friday afternoon it was "working to assess the impact of the CrowdStrike outage on patient care and HHS systems, services, and operations." 

Crowdstrike, the firm whose software led to the outage, has said it was not caused by a cybersecurity attack and the systems it runs remain protected. The company issued an apology Friday morning as many software systems were still down.

"We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption," Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post on X. "We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on."