Dynacare labs in Manitoba are returning to normal operations after a global technology outage forced all locations to close Friday.
The ripple effects of the outage were still being felt in some parts of the world Saturday, as affected governments, banks, airlines and businesses continued to restore systems or services.
“All of our locations usually open on Saturday are up and running and we will be back to 100 per cent normal operations as of Monday morning,” Dynacare spokesman Mark Bernhardt wrote in an email.
Porter Airlines was affected Friday, but has returned to normal operations.(Mike Deal / Free Press files)
He said people should visit the company’s website to check the current hours of the location they plan to visit.
Some labs reopened Friday afternoon, while systems were brought back in service. Government-contracted Dynacare has about 20 locations in Manitoba, providing blood tests and urinalysis.
TD Bank’s website continued to report longer wait times than usual Saturday morning. Telus’s website said customer support may be interrupted.
Advance ticket sales for Winnipeg Fringe Festival performances are available for purchase again online and in person. Sales and the festival’s website were disrupted until early Friday evening.
In-hour ticketing systems for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Winnipeg Goldeyes were also working again.
Toronto-based Porter Airlines, which cancelled flights to and from Winnipeg while it was affected Friday, has returned to normal operations.
The Winnipeg Airports Authority’s computer systems were not affected.
Thousands of flights around the world were grounded due to the outage.
Widespread outages happened when a faulty update was sent to Microsoft Windows-based computers by U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, the latter firm said.
In a blog post, CrowdStrike said a sensor configuration update for its Falcon antivirus software “triggered a logic error” — a mistake or bug in a code — resulting in a system crash and blue screens being displayed on affected systems.
The company said the problem was resolved Friday, and it was not the result of or related to a cyberattack.
A Dynacare location in St. Boniface was one of many closed on Friday owing to the IT outage. (Chris Kitching / Free Press files)
“We understand how this issue occurred and we are doing a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic flaw occurred,” the post stated.
“This effort will be ongoing. We are committed to identifying any foundational or workflow improvements that we can make to strengthen our process. We will update our findings in the root cause analysis as the investigation progresses.”
CrowdStrike said it has more than 20,000 subscription customers worldwide.
“All of these systems are running the same software,” cyber expert James Bore told The Associated Press. “We’ve made all of these tools so widespread that when things inevitably go wrong — and they will, as we’ve seen — they go wrong at a huge scale.”
Public health systems in some parts of Canada, including B.C. and Ontario, were affected.
Manitoba’s was not directly affected because Shared Health’s digital services provider uses a different provider for cybersecurity needs, a spokesperson said.
Manitoba government and City of Winnipeg systems were not affected.
chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca
Chris Kitching
Reporter
Chris Kitching is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He began his newspaper career in 2001, with stops in Winnipeg, Toronto and London, England, along the way. After returning to Winnipeg, he joined the Free Press in 2021, and now covers a little bit of everything for the newspaper. Read more about Chris.
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