UPDATE: Sault Area Hospital computer systems restored after outage

1:38 p.m. update:

Sault Area Hospital has released the following statement:

Code Grey has now been cleared and all computer systems have been restored. At about 3:40 a.m., SAH called a Code Grey – infrastructure loss of our computer systems. The outage occurred as a result of the global IT outage. This was not a cyber incident and no patient information was breached.

Thank you to our patients and the community for their patience as we have worked to restore our systems. We are also grateful to our staff and physicians for their diligent and prompt response to ensure patient safety. A special thanks to our entire IT team for their dedicated hard work in bringing our systems back online.

9:53 a.m. original story:

Sault Area Hospital’s computer systems are down as a result of a global technology outage that grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday.

Sault Area Hospital put a Code Grey into effect at 3:40 a.m. Friday said Rose Calibani, SAH communications and public affairs officer in communication with SooToday.

“This is an infrastructure loss. All computer systems, including the patients’ electronic medical records are down,” Calibani said.

Telephone systems are still operational.

SAH’s main line is (705) 759-3434.

“The outage is due to the current worldwide I.T. (information technology) outage. This is not a cyber accident,” Calibani said.

SAH has ‘downtime procedures’ in effect. Manual procedures may cause delays and some patient procedures may be rescheduled. Affected patients will be contacted.

“Patient safety is Sault Area Hospital’s priority and all emergencies will be prioritized. If you have an emergency please call 911 or proceed to the emergency department. Do not delay care. Our I.T. department is diligently working to restore our computer systems as soon as possible. Sault Area Hospital will keep the community updated as soon as our systems are restored,” Calibani said.

Airlines, police services and other users of Microsoft's 365 cloud services have reported outages worldwide starting last night. 

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and escalating disruptions continued after the technology company said it was gradually fixing it.