What You Need to Know About the Recent Worldwide Microsoft Tech Outage

If an extended delay and cancellation affects you, here’s what you need to know:

• The government requires airlines to give a full refund to passengers if a flight is canceled for any reason.
• A rule issued in April defines a “significant change” to a flight and how long a delay must last before triggering refunds. The new rule said significant changes to a flight include departure or arrival times that exceed three hours for domestic travel and six hours for international travel.
• When trying to make new travel plans at the airport, be polite. It may inspire customer service representatives to take that extra step to help.

Electronic medical records aren’t able to be retrieved

The outage also blocked access to doctors’ electronic medical records and appointment systems in offices across the country. Many offices temporarily returned to paper.

Hospitals across the U.S., England, Germany and Israel cut back on services.

Mass General Brigham in Boston posted on its website that “a major worldwide software outage has affected many of our systems,” including patient records and scheduling. It noted that nonurgent visits would be rescheduled, and asked patients not to call. The hospital remained open for emergencies and urgent appointments and procedures.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital also experienced problems.

In a statement, it said: “Procedures are in place to ensure that we can continue to provide safe, high-quality care to our patients while we return to normal operations. Surgical cases are proceeding, and outpatient appointments are occurring.”

Emergency 911 systems in Alaska, New Hampshire, Ohio and the city of Phoenix were affected, but most had been restored by late morning. As computers stopped working in Phoenix, 911 operators had to manually write down details for first responders, according to The Arizona Republic, but the departments’ systems were restored.

CVS said its drugstores and pharmacies were operating normally. Several pharmacy chains were affected this year when the computer systems of UnitedHealthcare subsidiary Change Healthcare faced a cyberattack.

If an outage were to reoccur, here are some tips for patients to lessen the number of calls to medical staff:

• If you have a medical appointment or procedure scheduled, try checking the website of the hospital or your doctor’s office for an announcement about the outage. Unless instructed otherwise, call to ask if you need to reschedule.
• If you have an emergency, call 911. If 911 is affected in your area, call the main number for the local police station. Emergency rooms remain open across the country.

Banks and payment systems return to normal

The outage affected banks and payment systems, particularly overseas, but in the U.S., everything was up and running by midmorning. Since the problem wasn’t nefarious, consumers didn’t have to worry about compromised accounts. 

“It is a tech outage, not a cyberattack, so there is no risk to the safety of your money. Even issues accessing money would be temporary in nature until a fix is deployed,” says Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

If you're still concerned about the after effects of the outage, visit a physical branch and conduct your banking with a teller. 

The outage had no long-term effect on the financial services industry, said a spokesperson from FS-ISAC, a member-driven, not-for-profit organization that advances cybersecurity and resilience in the global financial system. Core functions, including banking and payment processing were largely functioning with some scattered effects.

CrowdStrike posted solutions that many financial services companies put in place.

Smartphones, Apple Mac computers escape the drama

While the outage disabled many Windows computers, people who use Apple Macs were spared. So were many home PC owners, since CrowdStrike mainly works with large businesses.

Many employees using PCs  were instructed to reach out to the company’s information technology department to fix the issue.

A workaround involved booting into Safe Mode on Windows, but that often required administrative access.

1. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.

2. Locate the file titled “C-0000029*.sys.” Delete it.

3. Restart your computer normally.

In the future, first exercise patience. "If you have a blue screen, it's always a good strategy to first restart your personal computer," says Andrius Minkevičius, cofounder and chief information security officer of CyberUpgrade, a Lithuanian company that specializes in cybersecurity solutions. If that doesn't work and you don't have tech support to assist you, he suggests switching to a smartphone or tablet.

When incidents like this occur, scammers try to benefit from the confusion. A common ploy is sending out phishing texts or emails to have you download malicious software disguised as a fix.

On NBC's Today show, CrowdStrike's Kurtz acknowledged, “It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover."

This story, originally published July 19, 2024, was updated with AARP advice about protecting yourself against scams related to the outage.