In the latest sign of the fallout from the CrowdStrike outage, Seattle-based Bloodworks Northwest says the incident delayed shipments of critical supplies and resulted in the cancellation of appointments for nearly 250 blood donors.
Bloodworks Northwest issued an appeal Monday asking people in the region to schedule appointments via its website to donate blood. The nonprofit is one of numerous health providers that were impacted by the outage of Windows PCs caused by a faulty update from the CrowdStrike cybersecurity vendor.
Bloodworks Northwest says it had multiple systems disrupted due to the outage. Donor appointments at centers and planned blood drives were cancelled when computers used by the organization went down. Its staff is troubleshooting the problems and expects a full recovery to take several days, but donations and appointments have resumed.
Microsoft said over the weekend that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected. That amounts to less than 1 percent of all Windows machines.
However, many of CrowdStrike’s customers are businesses and organizations responsible for critical infrastructure. Airlines and health-care institutions were among the hardest-hit by the outage.
A faulty CrowdStrike update caused Windows machines to boot into a “Blue Screen of Death,” resulting in a widespread outage of key IT systems for many companies and organizations around the world.
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 help IT departments recover from the outage.
The incident came at a particularly unfortunate time for blood donations, 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 tend to drop.
You can schedule an appointment to donate blood here.