The situation is gradually returning to normal at airports, hospitals and police stations across the country after a global outage affected computers running Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft estimated Saturday that the faulty update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike had affected 8.5 million Windows devices. In Canada, the effects of the outage were felt most in air travel. Porter Airlines grounded its planes for most of the day. Many flights between Canada and the United States were cancelled or delayed at airports in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.
On Saturday, Montreal’s Trudeau airport announced that its operations had returned to normal, but warned that flights of the airlines most affected by the outage could be modified.
A spokesperson for Vancouver International Airport told The Canadian Press that air activity remains disrupted over North America.
On the hospital side, the University Health Network, one of Canada’s largest hospital networks, the Newfoundland Health Authority and Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto have all indicated that the situation has returned to normal.
“The University Health Network is resuming normal operations following the global outage. We do not anticipate any further delays in appointments,” the organization’s website read.
In Edmonton, 911 service has been restored after a major disruption to emergency communications services.
Steve Waterhouse, a cybersecurity expert, says the outage should lead to a wake-up call for Canadian organizations and businesses.
“This is of the utmost importance, because the outage has paralyzed many sectors of our economy, of our society,” he emphasizes, recalling that other major outages could well occur in the future.
According to him, the centralization of all data and emails in recent years places society in a great vulnerability if things go wrong. He recommends that private and public organizations review their way of doing things.
“These are consequences that we must anticipate in the future,” he says. “We must prepare an alternative instead of assuming that everything will be available. It’s the same when there is a power outage; we have candles to light our way in the absence of power.”