Medical Appointments, Surgeries Axed At U.S. Hospitals Amid CrowdStrike Outage

Nonemergency surgeries, procedures and medical visits were canceled or suspended at multiple hospitals across the country Friday amid a global software outage that has kept health care workers from accessing medical records, prescriptions, scheduling, and other electronic tools and documents.

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the state’s largest, said it has canceled “all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits” due to the outage linked to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The outage is said to have primarily affected computers using the CrowdStrike software with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The hospital said in a statement that its clinics and emergency departments remain open to patients with urgent health concerns, “and we continue to care for all patients currently receiving care in our hospitals.”

Penn Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania also said that it is canceling and will reschedule some appointments Friday due to the outage. The medical system said in a statement that it is “making every effort to contact patients whose appointments need to be canceled.”

Even crucial appointments were reportedly being canceled at some facilities, however.

In Kentucky, a 73-year-old man’s daughter told The Associated Press that his emergency open heart surgery at Baptist Hospital in Paducah was abruptly canceled early Friday due to the system outage.

“It’s an emergency surgery, so if anything happens, it would be as a result of not having the surgery this morning,” said Alison Baulos.

A representative for Baptist Health confirmed to HuffPost in a statement that it is experiencing disruptions tied to the CrowdStrike incident and that it has canceled some “non-emergency