How is global tech outage affecting Sacramento airport? Hospitals? Here’s what we know

A global technology outage on Friday morning temporarily grounded flights at Sacramento International Airport and closed local government offices, officials said.

Some medical care facilities in the Sacramento area were also affected.

A faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected customers running Microsoft Windows, The Associated Press reported, knocking media outlets offline, disrupting hospitals and government agencies and forcing airlines around the world to cancel or delay flights.

Crowdstrike said the outage was “not a hacking incident or cyberattack,” the Associated Press said, adding that a fix was reportedly on the way.

Here’s how the outage has affected the Sacramento area.

Sacramento airport sees canceled flights due to tech outage

Sacramento International Airport saw some canceled flights early Friday morning due to the worldwide tech outage, according to Scott Johnston, Sacramento County Department of Airports spokesman.

He said the airlines are working to get those passengers rerouted.

As of about 7 a.m. Friday, Johnston said, all airlines — even those that were “affected minorly” by the outage — were back online.

“We are fully operational,” Johnston said. “We are back to normal operations.”

He advised travelers to check directly with their airlines to make sure there haven’t been delays or cancellations.

You can also check your flight status online via the airport’s website.

How have computer issues affected local hospitals?

In a statement on Friday morning, Dignity Health said some of its medical facilities across the Greater Sacramento region were affected by the outage.

“We continue to provide safe, high-quality care to our patients and thank everyone for their patience as our teams take immediate action to restore any impacted systems,” Dignity Health said in a statement Friday morning.

The health care company said “patients will be contacted directly if their appointments are affected.”

Dignity Health operates six hospitals in the Sacramento area, including Mercy General Hospital and Methodist Hospital of Sacramento, as well as other medical facilities.

The CrowdStrike outage also affected some systems at facilities run by Kaiser Permanente, which has a number of hospitals, clinics and urgent care facilities in the capital region.

In a statement Friday morning, Kaiser Permanente Northern California said it activated its national command center at 4:30 a.m. Friday to “address this incident, evaluate the impacts to our care operations, computer systems and servers, and coordinate recovery as needed.”

“In some situations, we have activated backup systems to support both continuous patient care and to secure access to medical records,” Kaiser Permanente said, adding that all of its hospitals and medical offices “remain open for care and service.”

No surgeries were canceled at UC Davis Medical Center on Friday due to the outage, hospital spokesperson Liam Connolly said, and patient care continued uninterrupted.

“We are in the business of disaster preparedness, and we have plans for how to ensure patients receive care in all kinds of situations,” Connolly said. “We are open and conducting business as usual.”

Sacramento County offices closed

As of Friday morning, some Sacramento County government offices are closed due to the IT outage.

In a post on X, county officials said the Tax Collection and Business Licensing public counters at 700 H St. were closed, as of 9 a.m. Friday.

Also shut were the county’s Building Permit Centers at Goethe Road and 827 Seventh St. and the Coroner’s Office public counters.

What about banks?

Golden 1 Credit Union, which has branches and ATMs across Sacramento, said they are aware of the issue.

“Our services, including ATMs and mobile and online banking, are fully available,” Chad Carrington, Golden 1 Credit Union senior vice president and chief Information officer, told The Sacramento Bee. “We are working diligently to assess any potential impacts as the day continues.

“We are grateful to our team for their hard work to ensure we can serve our members and community.”

Downdetector, a real-time outage monitor, reported Friday that it had received outage reports for Chase and Bank of America.

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