Flights delayed, cancelled at Trudeau airport after Microsoft crash

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A worldwide technology outage affecting many Microsoft systems led to flight cancellations and delays at Montreal’s Trudeau airport Friday, but Quebec hospitals weren’t affected by the service interruption linked to a popular security software.

Aéroports de Montréal spokesperson Eric Forest said Delta, American Airlines and United Airlines were affected by the computer issue. Service had resumed by early afternoon, though delays and cancellations were reported across their networks.

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Porter Airlines began resumption of operations about 2:30 p.m., though some Porter flights scheduled to leave Montreal later in the day remained cancelled.

While the Montreal airport’s computer systems were not affected, U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unable to process passengers travelling to U.S. destinations Friday morning.

“Fortunately, the problem has now been resolved and passenger processing is gradually resuming, but delays are obviously to be expected at this level, necessarily resulting in flight delays this morning,” Forest said around 10 a.m.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. CrowdStrike made clear the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services and disruptions continued after the technology company said it was gradually fixing the problem.

In Canada, the outage affected hospitals in Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario, though not Quebec.

“The health and social services network is not using the antivirus at the source of the incident and is not affected by this outage,” Marie-Claude Lacasse, a spokesperson for the Quebec heath department, wrote in an email. “We have, however, advised establishments to be vigilant.”

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Telecommunications company Telus said some of its employees were unable to access computer systems, while credit union federation Desjardins said its employees couldn’t access Windows systems on Friday morning.

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Compounding the issue, Microsoft reported an apparently unrelated problem with its Azure cloud service.

There have been few outages of this scale in the past few years. CrowdStrike customers posted blue error screens to social media as they were prevented from accessing laptops and corporate computers. The cascading failures underscored how a growing proportion of businesses have moved services and support processes online in recent years, seeking to cut costs or better unify global operations.

“This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”

Carol Fung of Concordia University, who holds the Gina Cody Research Chair on cybersecurity and the internet of things, said although it’s not yet clear what exactly went wrong, software updates intended to solve certain bugs sometimes do introduce new problems.

In situations like this, organizations affected by the issue may be able to revert to a previous version of the affected software or to use different operating systems, like Linux or macOS to run programs.

Using a single operating system across an organization increases its vulnerability to outages and cyberattacks, she said.

With files from The Canadian Press.

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