Across Philly region, the tech outage affected operations at the airport, hospitals, and courts

A massive, international technology outage scrambled operations across the Philadelphia region Friday, with airlines grounding scores of flights, some hospitals canceling elective surgeries, and workplaces shutting down for the day.

The outage that affected computers running the Microsoft operating system stemmed from an issue with the cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, which updated its software just before millions of Windows 10 users began reaching error screens.

Companies and government entities were in the process of recovering Friday by manually updating their servers and computers. Experts warned that residual impacts were likely to stretch into next week, and the outage — described as one of the largest in history — underscored the degree to which global systems can be affected by problems at a single tech firm.

At Philadelphia International Airport, 90 flights were canceled and 155 were delayed before systems came back online by early afternoon. Thousands of travelers were stuck for hours as communications screens displayed ominous error messages.

Penn Medicine canceled elective surgeries and rescheduled appointments at some locations. Main Line Health also canceled some nonemergency surgeries in departments like plastic surgery and podiatry, and both hospital systems’ websites were down for a few hours.

Government systems were impacted in the city of Philadelphia and across the region, with employees experiencing slowness on their computers. Most agencies said public safety functions were operational by midmorning Friday.

» READ MORE: Live updates: Outage affects operations across Philadelphia region

In Gloucester County, the 911 system was down for four hours early Friday. Microsoft systems went down across Camden County’s 46 departments, requiring manual updates to over 1,000 computers. And in Bensalem Township, Bucks County, the entire IT system was offline for hours before recovering at about 8:30 a.m. Friday.

“The issue is, you have to touch every computer to make the fix,” Bensalem Finance Manager John Chaykowski said, “so it’s been time consuming.”

In Philadelphia city government, employee systems were “completely inoperable” Friday morning, according to Chief Information Office Melissa Scott, but public safety systems such as 911 were up and running throughout the disruption.

Scott said city officials were notified at about 2:30 a.m. of a planned antivirus software rollout by CrowdStrike, and that every server and computer that was powered up at that time was affected by the outage. Technicians fanned out across city departments to run fixes on affected computers, a process that will continue through the weekend.

”No one is resting. No one is slowing or easing up our response, and no one assumes everything is fixed,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said. “We’re going to keep at this until every computer system, every laptop, and every component of our IT apparatus is working as it should.”

Some services were more disrupted than others. The courts system was shut down for the day, and visitation was canceled for the day at the jail complex on State Road. A few city health centers experienced operational delays.

At Philadelphia’s Apple Tree Family Intake Center for people experiencing homelessness, staff told families anxiously seeking shelter beds to be patient as only four out of about a dozen computers were functioning Friday morning.

Rafik Jones, 32, of Strawberry Mansion, said he’d been waiting about five hours at the center with his wife and their young children. The outage, to him, was one more hitch in an already dysfunctional system.

”They just bounce us back and forth,” he said.

Thousands of Philadelphia municipal employees still reported to work — the technology issues came just days after all city employees were required to return to in-person work five days a week.

In the courts, officials said hearings would be rescheduled, and they sent jurors who were summoned to Center City home. One juror, Sean Damon, said he heard about the global outage in the news before he left for City Hall, but didn’t expect it would affect his jury service.

”I woke up, had my coffee, read in the paper about this affecting the airlines, but I didn’t think it was going to hit City Hall,” he said.

The outage affected systems in a variety of sectors around the world, with airlines and banks citing frequent disruptions and users reported slowness in accessing critical information. President Joe Biden was briefed on the outage Friday morning and the White House said it was in touch with CrowdStrike.

According to officials at CrowdStrike, the issue was not a cyberattack, but stemmed from a bug tied to an update for Windows 10 software users. Starting as early as Thursday afternoon, millions of desktop PCs and laptops using CrowdStrike and operating on Windows 10 were hit with the “Blue Screen of Death,” also known as BSOD.

The dreaded screen flashed above the American Airlines check-in counter at the airport Friday morning.

One traveler, Jill Holley, got to the airport around 5:30 a.m., but didn’t find out her flight to Baton Rouge, La., for a family memorial was canceled until she was through security and waiting to board. Holley said she planned to leave the airport and head home to Maryland.

”I know they can’t help it,” she said. “This is a weird thing. It’s almost scary, isn’t it?”

Helen Anderson was supposed to be heading to Orlando on a 3:30 p.m. Frontier Airlines flight Friday, but when she got to the airport around 12:50 p.m., she found out it was delayed.

She said it was a minor inconvenience, but still unsettling.

“I’m just concerned about what’s gonna happen to us if we really do get a cyberattack,” Anderson said. “We apparently cannot operate without it — without technology.”

Staff writers Emily Bloch, Abraham Gutman, Ximena Conde, Rob Tornoe, Wendy Ruderman, John Duchneskie, Beatrice Forman, Rodrigo Torrejon, Layla A. Jones, Fallon Roth, and Vinny Vella contributed to this article.