In the latest sign of the fallout from the CrowdStrike outage, Seattle-based Bloodworks Northwest reports that the incident delayed shipments of critical supplies and led to the cancellation of appointments for nearly 250 blood donors.
Bloodworks Northwest issued an appeal on Monday, urging people in the region to schedule appointments via its website to donate blood. The nonprofit is among numerous health providers impacted by the outage of Windows PCs, which was caused by a faulty update from the CrowdStrike cybersecurity vendor.
Bloodworks Northwest stated that multiple systems were disrupted due to the outage. Donor appointments at centers and planned blood drives were canceled when the organization’s computers went down. Its staff is currently troubleshooting the issues, with a full recovery expected to take several days. However, donations and appointments have resumed.
Microsoft noted over the weekend that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected, representing less than 1 percent of all Windows machines.
Nevertheless, many of CrowdStrike’s customers are businesses and organizations with responsibility for critical infrastructure. Airlines and healthcare institutions were among the hardest hit by the outage.
A faulty CrowdStrike update caused Windows machines to boot into a “Blue Screen of Death,” leading to a widespread outage of key IT systems for many companies and organizations globally.
CrowdStrike previously outlined a fix for the issue, which involves booting Windows machines in safe mode and deleting the file associated with the buggy update. This weekend, Microsoft released a tool to assist IT departments in recovery from the outage.
The incident occurred at an especially unfortunate time for blood donations, coinciding with the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day known as the “100 Deadliest Days” due to teen crashes, which is also a time when donations typically decline.
You can schedule an appointment to donate blood here.
