Providence Swedish response to CrowdStrike outage

Patient safety and access to care our are top priorities and our IT teams have been working to respond to this global issue. 

Update as of Monday, July 22:

Providence Swedish, like organizations across the world, remains impacted by the CrowdStrike outage that began late last Thursday. However, with our IT teams working nonstop throughout the weekend we have made significant progress on restoring impacted systems.

“The CrowdStrike outage has had a massive, global impact across nearly all industries. Providence has made considerable progress in restoring services since last Friday with more than 1,000 team members and volunteers working around the clock as part of our recovery efforts,” said B.J. Moore, Chief Information Officer. "Thanks to an incredible team effort, we are continuing to deliver safe, quality care for patients with operations returning to near normal levels.”

Some notable highlights of our progress so far:

• All facilities are operationally ready to support normal operations starting Monday morning with some possible delays.
• All clinical applications and back-end servers have been recovered, and many locations have all their applications back online.
• Although many PCs and devices still need to be restored, more than half of our estimated Mission-critical devices that were affected on Thursday have been restored.

An intensive effort began this morning to set up on-site “tech bars” at 56 facilities throughout Providence’s family of organizations. These are intended to quickly help caregivers/employees still having issues with laptops by providing in-person service.

“We’re putting every resource available toward getting all our caregivers back up and running at full speed so they can serve our communities as effectively as possible,” said Moore. “Providence is a Mission-focused, service-driven organization and this response demonstrates our commitment to those principles.”

As Providence Swedish continues to address this situation, patient care will be ongoing. People should not delay emergency or urgent care.

CrowdStrike triggered a massive IT outage when it deployed an update that contained a defect in its Falcon Endpoint product, which caused widespread disruptions.

We are grateful for the patience of our patients, caregivers, and all others impacted by this disruption. Please rest assured that we are making every effort to rectify this situation. As always, our emphasis remains on patient safety and community access. 

We will provide updates as additional information becomes available.

About Providence Swedish

Providence Swedish has served the Puget Sound region since the first Providence hospital opened in Seattle in 1877 and the first Swedish hospital opened in 1910. The two organizations affiliated in 2012 and today comprise the largest health care delivery system in Western Washington, with 22,000 caregivers, eight hospitals and 244 clinics. A not-for-profit family of organizations, Providence Swedish provides more than $406 million in community benefit in the Puget Sound Region each year. The health system offers a comprehensive range of services and specialty and subspecialty care in a number of clinical areas, including cancer, cardiovascular health, neurosciences, orthopedics, digestive health and women’s and children’s care.