SW FL hospitals, airports coping with tech outage. Is medical care delayed? What about flights?

Southwest Florida felt the impact Friday from a worldwide outage that grounded some aspects of daily life to a halt.

As of Friday morning, hospitals were working to get operations back to normal. Travelers at Southwest Florida International Airport were dealing with some delays and flight cancellations.

Lee Health, the largest hospital system in Lee County, say crucial functions, like emergency rooms, are working, according to spokeswoman Mary Briggs.

"Like many others around the globe, Lee Health began experiencing general service disruption overnight due to a software bug in a widely used security product," Briggs, of Lee Health, said. "Our (information technology) response team was quickly mobilized and are working to return all systems to normal operation as quickly as possible."

Briggs added: "Our most critical systems are operational. This includes full operation of Epic, our electronic health record system and MyChart, Lee Health’s patient portal. Employees may experience some disruption connecting their devices to our network as we work to restore device functionality."

Patients do not need to be alarmed that their patient records are in jeopardy, she said.

"This outage did not involve any form of unauthorized access to Lee Health systems, data, or networks," she said. "Our hospitals, pharmacies and emergency rooms are fully operational and we plan to open our physician offices as normal this morning."

What has been the impact on NCH and Physicians Regional in Collier County?

NCH in Collier County said the only impact is to voice dictation that physicians use so they have had to type notes instead of use verbal dictation, NCH spokeswoman Amanda Lucey said.

“No other issues (have been) identified and it is business as usual,” she said. “(We are) still treating patients as normal and no surgery cancellations.”

Physicians Regional Healthcare System in Collier says there is no impact to services.

“The current tech outage is not affecting the operations or patient care for Physicians Regional Healthcare System at this time,” spokeswoman Brittney Thoman said.

What was the global tech outage impact at RSW in Fort Myers?

RSW and Punta Gorda Airport in Charlotte County were experiencing some delays and cancellations. But things started to improve by mid-morning on Friday.

"American, Delta and United now all have flights moving out of RSW. We strongly recommend passengers traveling today check their airline website for the most up-to-date information on flights," said Victoria Moreland, Chief Communications & Marketing Officer for the Lee County Port Authority in an email just before 9:30 a.m. Friday.

What is the flight status at RSW in Fort Myers?

Check here for arrivals and departures.

What is the flight status at Punta Gorda airport?

Check here.

What caused the disruption around the world?

CrowdStrike, a U.S. firm that advertises being used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, said one of its recent content updates had a defect that impacted Microsoft's Windows Operating System, adding the incident was "not a security incident or cyberattack."