Residents in Windsor-Essex woke up Friday morning to long delays at the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge, and nurses at Windsor Regional Hospital were back to paper charting.
To blame, a global Microsoft outage.
Late Friday afternoon, it was confirmed that the CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage was not the result of a cyberattack and that the problem occurred when a faulty update was deployed to computers running Microsoft Windows.
At the Tunnel, CEO Tal Czudner warned commuters the wait to cross the border was at least an hour. The Ambassador Bridge reported computer problems for extended delays at that border crossing.
Wait times at both the bridge and tunnel had eased up as Friday afternoon went on.
A joint statement signed by the three Windsor-Essex health systems said the situation had improved at Windsor Regional Hospital, Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, and Erie Shores Healthcare.
"The majority of clinical systems have been restored and remaining non-clinical systems will be completed over the weekend," read the statement. "While wait times have been reduced significantly due to these efforts, patients may experience minor delays over the course of the weekend. Hospitals will contact patients directly if there is an impact to appointments or procedures."
TransForm said Blue Water Health in Sarnia, and the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance were also affected.
Around the world, flights were grounded, bank networks were affected, and hospital systems were knocked offline Friday morning.