The effects of the computer outage that paralyzed part of the global economy were also felt in Quebec on Friday. At Montreal-Trudeau airport in particular, flights were cancelled and delayed. Travellers struggled to receive assistance from airlines. A global event that clearly demonstrates our “ultra-dependence” on digital technologies, experts note.
What there is to know
- An update to CrowdStrike antivirus software has caused several Windows systems to crash around the world.
- Many flights have been cancelled or delayed at Montreal-Trudeau airport.
- Porter Airlines flights were all cancelled until 3 p.m., and Pal Airlines, the Atlantic Canada carrier, said it had computer problems affecting its reservations system.
- Flights by US carriers Delta, American and United were disrupted.
- ICI RDI television operations were also affected, as were several radio shows, whose broadcasts were disrupted on Friday morning.
- At Groupe Desjardins, some employees had difficulty connecting to their computers on Friday morning, but AccèsD services and ATMs were operating as usual.
- While hospitals were affected by the outage in Canada and around the world, the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) reported that the Quebec network does not use the antivirus that caused the outage and is therefore continuing its activities normally.
From the start of the day, the effects of this outage due to an update linked to the antivirus offered by the American group CrowdStrike, affecting Windows and a large number of its users, were felt throughout Canada and Quebec.
Read “Who is CrowdStrike, the firm behind the global computer blackout?”
At Dorval airport, as in many others around the world, many flights were delayed or cancelled in the morning.
U.S. border services were disrupted, meaning passengers on flights to U.S. destinations could not be processed. “Fortunately, the problem has been resolved and passenger processing is gradually resuming, but obviously, delays are to be expected at this level, necessarily causing flight delays,” explained a spokesperson for Aéroports de Montréal, Émilie Chevrette.
She added that American Airlines, Delta and United Airlines have also been affected, but their operations have also gradually resumed. On the Canadian side, Porter has decided to cancel all its flights until 3 p.m.
By the end of the day Friday, 11% of flights scheduled to leave Montreal’s airport had been cancelled, half of them by Porter. The number of cancelled flights stood at 158 in Canada and more than 5,000 worldwide, according to the aeronautical analysis firm Cirium.
A day of delays at Montreal-Trudeau airport
Around 3:30 p.m., delays caused by the outage were still being felt in Dorval. Dozens of travelers were piling up in front of Porter’s counters.
“We were taken hostage,” said Solène Delicourt, who was due to take a flight to San Francisco on Friday morning. Her group of seven people waited more than 12 hours at the airport, with no news.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Solène Delicourt and her group have been waiting at the Montreal airport since 4 a.m.
” [On n’a pas reçu] of water bottles, just two donuts. We don’t know anything, we can’t get a refund. We have to wait,” said group member Cathy Ouellette. “It’s a bad experience,” said the first-time traveler.
The 4:10 p.m. flight to Toronto was also canceled, a fact that many travelers only learned once they arrived. Jessica Herold showed up at the airport at 3 p.m., before having to turn around. “I never got the message that it was canceled,” she said.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Lloyd Perada and Maggie Perada wait for confirmation that their flight to Toronto has been cancelled outside the Porter offices.
The situation was similar in front of Delta counters, despite the gradual resumption of services.
Mahdi Hotait was in danger of missing his connection because of a two-hour delay on his flight to New York. The young man waited on the Delta phone line for more than an hour, but never reached an agent. He went to the airport to find a solution. “I couldn’t [régler le problème] online. Nothing was working,” he said.
For many of those travelers, Friday’s computer outage meant a difficult day of travel, or a day off their vacation. Similar situations have occurred at several international airports, including Toronto, Paris and New Delhi.
Check the flight schedule at Montreal-Trudeau airport
At the Desjardins complex in downtown Montreal, employees of the Mouvement Desjardins continued to rush to the technology center on Friday evening, with their computers in hand.
Although the computer outage did not affect services to members and customers, many employees were unable to open their workstation on their work computer.
“The teams quickly got into action to ensure that the various patches were deployed to employees’ workstations so that they could have access to their computers again,” assures Desjardins Group spokesperson Jean-Benoît Turcotti.
According to him, no “significant impact” has been identified for members and customers.
“We will continue to apply the patches until the last computer is functional and operational,” adds Jean-Benoît Turcotti.
Functional hospitals
On the information technology side, Radio-Canada and TVA Nouvelles also experienced some broadcasting issues on Friday. Fortunately, however, Quebec hospitals seemed to be spared, unlike what was observed elsewhere in Canada and in some European countries.
“The health and social services network does not use the antivirus at the source of the event and is not affected by this outage,” confirmed a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Marie-Claude Lacasse. “However, we have advised establishments to be vigilant,” she assured.
However, several banking problems have been reported at Desjardins, National Bank, RBC and TD Bank, to name a few. In the first case, the AccèsD service remained available, but several services could be slowed down due to problems accessing desktop computers. At RBC, glitches were observed with the facial recognition system.
In France, the outage also disrupted “the IT operations of Paris 2024”, indicated the Olympic organizing committee, a week before the opening ceremony on July 26.
The accreditation system was notably impaired, preventing some people from collecting their badges. Global stock markets also fell, worried by this outage, which also prevented the indices of the London and Milan stock exchanges from displaying their rate of change at their usual opening times.
Centralization, but at what price?
“Nobody likes talking about cybersecurity. It’s like talking about insurance. People never really like it when we talk about risks. But we see it today: it illustrates our ultra-dependence on technology, even if we tend to forget it. And we’re going to have to become aware of it as calmly as possible,” says Dominique Derrier, head of information security at Neotrust.
According to Alexis Dorais-Joncas, a cyber threat specialist at Proofpoint, the outage is in some way “the consequence of the centralization of many systems whose population depends on only certain suppliers, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Alibaba in China.”
“As robust and resilient as these systems may be, it’s still a link that can fall and really have a rapid domino effect on people’s lives,” he observes, also calling for broader reflection on their preponderant place.
It must be admitted that these events will happen again and that the world will “never be safe” from such disruptions, adds Mr. Dorais-Joncas. “What we see today is in the top 1% of global IT incidents, but the fact remains that technological systems have become incredibly complex, so incidents like this can always happen,” he says.
Cybersecurity specialist and lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke Steve Waterhouse assists Mr. Dorais-Joncas.
We have a concentration of services, but few alternatives, in fact. It’s a bit like putting all our eggs in one basket, on one cloud, so our businesses, our institutions and our society can quickly stop functioning.
Steve Waterhouse, cybersecurity specialist and lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke
“In the longer term, it’s going to take a long time to resolve everything,” Mr. Waterhouse also envisages. “It shows that we need to be much better prepared, to plan ahead, to have Plan Bs, which, unfortunately, too few people do,” he insists.
The expert finally warns the population to be vigilant against potential fraud associated with this outage. On social networks and online, on Friday, some malicious users tried to take advantage of the situation to steal personal information.
With Jean-Philippe Arcand and Fannie Arcand, The Press, and Agence France-Presse