Global tech outage affects medical, transportation and state operations in Vermont

Updated at 1:52 p.m.

Early Friday morning, as a technology outage spread across the globe, operations at key Vermont institutions and government agencies were temporarily disrupted.

Roughly 10% of the state’s computer systems were impacted, according to Andrea DeLaBruere, deputy secretary of the Vermont Agency of Digital Services.

Since then, DeLaBruere said around noon at an unrelated press conference held by Gov. Phil Scott, the state had “brought approximately 25% of those back online.” The bulk of the remaining problems should be resolved by the end of the day, she said.

DeLaBruere indicated that some state employees had been having difficulty accessing their email but that neither the state’s websites nor the 911 or 211 emergency lines appeared to have been affected.

At Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, where airlines’ computer systems crashed, passengers waited in the terminal unable to board their flights, according to airport director Nic Longo.

“Starting from 5 to 7 a.m., that’s our biggest outbound bank, and pretty much every flight was delayed,” Longo said.

The University of Vermont Health Network was also affected, according to a press release issued by spokesperson Annie Mackin. As of late morning Friday, she wrote, “most procedures and appointments” were continuing, “with some delays.”

There were some exceptions, however. At the UVM Medical Center in Burlington, both the dental clinic and outpatient phlebotomy were offline and unable to take patients, according to the press release.

At the Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, phlebotomy was likewise unavailable Friday, and radiology was “currently not able to take patients,” but expected to be functional again around 1 p.m.

At Porter Medical Center in Middlebury, according to the press release, “Phones at certain primary care clinics are not working properly, so patients may have trouble getting through.” However, patients with scheduled primary care appointments were encouraged to arrive as planned unless otherwise notified.

The tech outage was related to Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is employed by firms across the world, according to The New York Times . The company’s CEO, George Kurtz, said it was not a cyberattack but a bug in a software update that had crashed systems.

Kurtz said that the company had identified the issue and was helping its customers to resolve it. And among Vermont’s affected institutions, there were signs that things were beginning to improve as of late morning Friday.

According to Mackin, UVM Health Network IT teams were “working to implement the fix that has been provided by the vendor,” and were “gradually bringing impacted systems back online.”

And at the airport, Longo said that all the airlines’ systems were operational again as of 10 a.m., passengers were boarding their planes, and some of the delayed flights were taking off.

“There have been zero cancellations out of Burlington due to the outage,” said Longo, who indicated that the airport’s internal systems had been unaffected by the outage.

Longo encouraged people flying out of Burlington Friday afternoon to arrive early but said that, as of mid-morning, the airport was running smoothly. Persisting issues at other major airports, however, might mean that inbound flights arrive late, he said.

“We might have some residual delays this afternoon, of course,” said Longo.

At his press conference Friday, Scott emphasized that such a widespread outage was caused by one single software update, which he said highlighted the importance of “not putting all our eggs in one basket.”

Said Scott, “I’m not an IT whiz by any stretch, but I don’t believe that we should be dealing with one company in particular across the board, because you’re only as strong as your weakest link and if that link breaks and we are all using the same system, we’ll be in trouble.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Global tech outage affects medical, transportation and state operations in Vermont .