These Sask. businesses affected by global technology outage

A freak computer glitch caused havoc around the world, including in Saskatoon on Friday.

The City of Saskatoon says transit services were affected by the Microsoft operating system outage caused by a faulty software update by a third-party provider called CrowdStrike. As a result, bus location updates, service alerts, and mobile ticketing were affected.

In Regina, the Saskatchewan Roughriders say their ticket transfer and ticket downloading system was interrupted Friday morning for a brief period.

“We are fortunate to have seen all of that resolved recently and all fan-facing ticketing systems are operating normally,” said Arielle Zerr, director of communications and media relations for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. “Tickets continue to sell exceptionally well for tonight’s game and we’re expecting a big crowd.”

Some stores at Midtown Mall were requesting cash transactions for purchases while others were business as usual.

Services were interrupted at the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) as well.

“HealthLine 811 services have resumed as of after not being available for several hours earlier this morning,” reads a statement from the SHA. “If you are having an emergency, please call 9-1-1. At this time patients can continue to access emergency or acute care services delivered in SHA facilities.”

Tech experts say the economic fallout from this outage will leave some companies wanting accountability.

“There’s going to be a lot of lawsuits,” said Katrina German, founder of Ethical Digital. “This is going to take years to unfold because it’s had just such a global impact.”

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Natalia Stakhanova, the Canada Research Chair in Security & Privacy explains the cause of the I.T. outage, according to the companies involved.

“What it looks like happened is a simple update of the antivirus software,” said Stakhanova.

“CrowdStrike is the third-party vendor that builds the antivirus software and provides it for Windows clients, so all Windows devices running the software and on the business side of things. The update essentially was not compatible with the Windows operating system, and as a result the Windows operating system basically crashed.”

But this seemingly preventable occurrence has happened before, says Stakhanova. A McAfee antivirus software update proved incompatible with Windows, causing a slightly smaller global outage in 2010.

“It was a similar, smaller type of outage, also affecting Windows systems and antivirus software,” she said. “So to me, it’s interesting to see how history repeats itself, and how little was learned by Microsoft.”

Local tech companies like Gareth McKee of Burnt Orange Solutions are busy getting affected businesses back online in short order, and with minimal damage to their bottom line.

“Things are not returning to normal very quickly,” said McKee.

“The recovery process is very manual. And certainly, for companies with many desktop computers, this could take days and days before they’re fully recovered. Whether it’s a small business or a large business, that’s going to have a big knock-on effect.”

Years ago he says a client took a huge hit while being down for a week due to a ransomware attack.

“One company that’s about ten staff, and it cost them about $140,000,” said McKee. “That’s how much they lost in business in one week, so this really will have a big effect on some people’s bottom line.”

Despite the outage, McKee says it won’t stop the move to a paperless or digital society.

“I don't think it will stop the march forward to paperless et cetera, but, it will certainly make people like Microsoft put things in place where they can roll back much more quickly,” he said.

Microsoft emphasizes that this was not a cyber attack, rather it was a faulty software update that caused the largest global I.T. outage in history.