Health systems and hospitals expect many applications, computers and other systems to be back online early this week after Friday’s global CrowdStrike outage.
On Sunday, large systems including Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, Cleveland Clinic and Renton, Washington-based Providence said their systems were fully functional, or they expected them to be by Monday.
Read more: Global tech outage takes hospital EHRs offline
The outage stemmed from a defect in a CrowdStrike update for devices running Microsoft Windows. "Of the approximately 8.5 million Windows devices that were impacted, a significant number are back online and operational," CrowdStrike said in a social media post Sunday.
B.J. Moore, Providence’s chief information officer and an executive vice president, said the scope of Friday’s event made it more problematic than some cybersecurity attacks.
“If there's a cyberattack underway, you've got alerts that are going off,” Moore said. “You can begin turning off networks, you can turn on firewalls or things that kind of contain it. Whereas this, we didn't know it was deployed by CrowdStrike. So, none of our warning systems would catch it and by the time we knew it happened, all of our computers are down.”
The update initially took 15,000 of Providence’s application servers offline, but Moore said all services were functioning Sunday and procedures were taking place as planned. He said it will take the health system up to four weeks to finish bringing approximately 20,000 of Providence's computers back online.
Providence employees were spending between five and 20 minutes to remediate the issue on each of the system’s 70,000 computers, Moore said.
A spokesperson for Intermountain Health said all of its systems were restored.
Cleveland Clinic said most of its applications were back online Sunday. A spokesperson said the health system was continuing to work through some issues, but patient care had not been affected.
A spokesperson for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center said Sunday its information technology team was continuing to restore affected computers and servers.
Boston-based Mass General Brigham said the issue affected many of its computer systems, which caused it to cancel non-urgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits Friday. A spokesperson said Sunday the health system would resume normal clinical volume by Monday morning and scheduled appointments and procedures were expected to proceed as planned.
Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health also said it expected practices and clinics to be fully operational by Monday.