During a Global Tech Outage, ITS and Business Continuity Planning Delivered

The evening of July 18, a global technology outage hit sectors across the U.S., canceling flights, Starbucks orders and, at many hospitals and clinics, even patient care visits. The outage occurred from an update deployed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and affected many systems and PCs with Windows-based hardware.

Like other organizations worldwide using the software and Windows computers, UW Medicine had to react quickly. Thanks to UW Medicine Information Technology (IT) Services and UW Medicine’s business continuity planning, UW Medicine remained fully operational and patient care was not interrupted.

By the afternoon of the following day, IT Services had fixed all 760 affected servers, brought patient-facing clinical applications back online and, over the weekend, restored more than 99% of the roughly 5,000 computers affected by the outage (all of which had to be restored individually).

“I credit our teams who responded to this outage by working around the clock to restore our clinical systems and maintain uninterrupted patient care as well as our planning for business-disrupting events,” says Eric Neil, chief information officer of UW Medicine. “It’s why we were able to jump into action and maintain normal operations with minimal disruptions.”

He also sees it as a learning opportunity, to find places where we can collaborate better across the system and improve procedures for the future.

“We, as a system, are continuously prioritizing planning and response coordination, and it’s paying off for our patients,” says Danica Little, director of Preparedness for UW Medicine.

Both Neil and Little express gratitude to the clinical teams in the hospitals and clinics. “They adapted quickly and were patient while systems were being restored,” says Neil.

For UW Medicine Information Technology Services support, please visit one.uwmedicine.org (AMC login required).