Regional hospitals grappled with technical issues amid global IT outage

The Global IT outage Friday disrupted businesses and banks across the region and significantly impacted several local hospitals.

While Collingwood General and Marine Hospital and Georgian Bay General Hospital didn't experience any disruptions, technical issues began at 4 a.m. at Stevenson Memorial Hospital.

"We had reports of users being locked out of our systems," said William Bye, the Alliston hospital's chief financial information officer. "They were essentially receiving what people call the blue screen of death, where you cannot log into or reboot your computer, so all systems were basically locked down."

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Caused by the faulty Microsoft CrowdStrike update, staff at Stevenson Memorial Hospital experienced delays in starting their systems Friday morning, but they quickly resolved the issues and prevented disruptions to patient care.

"We always try to concentrate on patient safety," added Bye. "If that means reverting over to manual processes, that's fine as well, as long as our patients are being taken care of properly."

Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) in Barrie was arguably most impacted by the outage.

RVH officials told CTV News that its team was called in at 2 a.m. on Friday to address the technical issues they were experiencing, which led to diagnostics delays, resulting in further delays in the emergency department despite normal patient volumes.

However, RVH also reported minimal patient disruption, as the hospital maintained its ability to treat patients and emergencies throughout the day.

Soldiers' Memorial Hospital in Orillia also faced issues, but the effect on patient services was limited.

"Although IT systems were affected, sufficient computers were restored throughout the morning to support normal operations," hospital officials said in a statement to CTV News. "The hospital has comprehensive contingency plans to support infrastructure downtimes and will continue to monitor its systems to ensure proper functionality."

The hospitals CTV News spoke with reported regular operations were restored by mid-afternoon.