Dynacare, others affected by global tech outage start to resume service

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2024 (784 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dynacare labs in Manitoba are returning to normal operations after a global technology outage forced all locations to close Friday.

The ripple effects of the outage were still being felt in some parts of the world Saturday, as affected governments, banks, airlines and businesses continued to restore systems or services.

“All of our locations usually open on Saturday are up and running and we will be back to 100 per cent normal operations as of Monday morning,” Dynacare spokesman Mark Bernhardt wrote in an email.

He said people should visit the company’s website to check the current hours of the location they plan to visit.

Some labs reopened Friday afternoon, while systems were brought back in service. Government-contracted Dynacare has about 20 locations in Manitoba, providing blood tests and urinalysis.

TD Bank’s website continued to report longer wait times than usual Saturday morning. Telus’s website said customer support may be interrupted.

Advance ticket sales for Winnipeg Fringe Festival performances are available for purchase again online and in person. Sales and the festival’s website were disrupted until early Friday evening.

“Thanks to our ticketing system backup from July 18 evening, we were able to provide all our advance ticket patrons with their July 19 tickets (bought before the outage) as well as sell our usual at-the-door tickets for cash, so Fringers were able to see their shows,” Fringe executive producer Chuck McEwen said in a statement.

“Now that our ticketing system is working again, this morning we had a nice long line-up for the noon opening of advance tickets with Fringers eager to get tickets for the rest of the festival.”

Ticketing systems for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Winnipeg Goldeyes were also working again.

Toronto-based Porter Airlines, which cancelled flights to and from Winnipeg while it was affected Friday, has returned to normal operations.

The Winnipeg Airports Authority’s computer systems were not affected.

Thousands of flights around the world were grounded due to the outage.

Widespread outages happened when a faulty update was sent to Microsoft Windows-based computers by U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, the latter firm said.

In a blog post, CrowdStrike said a sensor configuration update for its Falcon antivirus software “triggered a logic error” — a mistake or bug in a code — resulting in a system crash and blue screens being displayed on affected systems.

The company said the problem was resolved Friday, and it was not the result of or related to a cyberattack.

“We understand how this issue occurred and we are doing a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic flaw occurred,” the post stated.

“This effort will be ongoing. We are committed to identifying any foundational or workflow improvements that we can make to strengthen our process. We will update our findings in the root cause analysis as the investigation progresses.”

CrowdStrike said it has more than 20,000 subscription customers worldwide.

“All of these systems are running the same software,” cyber expert James Bore told The Associated Press. “We’ve made all of these tools so widespread that when things inevitably go wrong — and they will, as we’ve seen — they go wrong at a huge scale.”

Public health systems in some parts of Canada, including B.C. and Ontario, were affected.

Manitoba’s was not directly affected because Shared Health’s digital services provider uses a different provider for cybersecurity needs, a spokesperson said.

Manitoba government and City of Winnipeg systems were not affected.

chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca

— with files from Ben Waldman

If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more.
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.