Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, the Santa Clarita Courthouse and Metrolink were among local agencies impacted during a global technology outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update on Friday that forced online systems to go dark and interrupted services.
The global technology outage was caused by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” stated CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on the social media platform “X.” He reassured customers that the disruption was not a cybersecurity attack and they were still protected from potential threats.
CrowdStrike provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices and many industries globally, CBS reported during the IT outage. The disruption impacted flights, hospitals, businesses and banks.
Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital went dark with its systems at approximately 11:30 p.m. Thursday and “we were pretty heavily impacted,” said Ray Moss, vice president and chief information officer for the hospital. Most systems were restored by 3:30 a.m. Friday and systems still having issues would not have a major impact on providing service to the hospital’s patients, he added.
Some of the systems that were impacted were workstations and servers running on Microsoft Windows operating systems, and health care workers didn’t have access to electronic medical records, but “most of our clinical systems, systems monitoring patients … were up, so patient care from that perspective was not impacted,” Moss said.
“The ability to admit patients, document on patients, that was down, and we have downtime procedures that we follow [to overcome that],” such as health care workers documenting information by hand, he said.
“We have procedures in place for cybersecurity kinds of things. We also have an incident command process that we follow … in any kind of emergency, so we’re prepped for these things. Our IT department quickly responded, rolled resources in and quickly figured out how to remediate the problem so we did OK,” Moss said. “We take the responsibility for the community very seriously and our preparations paid off this morning.”
The Superior Courts of Los Angeles County were also affected, including the Santa Clarita courthouse located at 23747 Valencia Blvd.
“The Superior Court of Los Angeles County continues to experience system-wide connectivity issues that are impacting the court’s ability to conduct business,” stated a public notice provided by the communications office on “X.”
Due to the connectivity issues, the court’s call centers were down and personnel were working to reestablish connection, stated the notice.
Courthouses remained open despite the ongoing issue but individuals could not access court dockets and related information. Electronic filing remained available and “matters unable to be heard due to connectivity will be continued. Litigants whose matters are unable to be heard today will be provided with notice of a continuance date,” said the notice. “Last day criminal matters (preliminary hearings and trials) and statutorily sensitive arraignments in the juvenile division will be addressed,” stated the updated public notice shared online.
Ticketing services on the Metrolink app were affected but transit service itself was not, said Metrolink Communications Director Scott Johnson.
“Last night at 6:50 [p.m.] we were notified by our mobile app vendor that payments were not working,” Johnson said. “We started communicating on our social media platforms and our customer communication channels early this morning due to this issue.”
Metrolink users could not purchase tickets on the mobile app so they were directed to the ticket machines, which are available at all stations. The Santa Clarita Valley has four Metrolink Stations: Newhall, Santa Clarita, Via Princessa, and its newest one at Vista Canyon.
The issue was resolved before 9 a.m. Friday, Johnson added.
The technological disruption did not impact Santa Clarita city officials as they are under SentinelOne, CrowdStrike’s competitor, said Benny Ives, information services manager for the city.
Many of the systems the city utilizes are on “premise Microsoft environment, which means the city controls and maintains its own systems as it relates to Microsoft products,” he said. “We take cybersecurity very seriously and that’s something that we’re constantly monitoring and whenever possible, we’re always doing our due diligence.”
The Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station was not affected by the IT outage, according to Deputy Hailey, a spokeswoman with the station.
