Likewise, operations in the affected hospitals were already running almost without problems on Friday. The reason for the outages was a faulty update for Windows users, which was deployed by the US cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.
At Vienna Airport, 100 of the 780 scheduled flights were affected by IT problems yesterday – some with significant delays. Of these 100, eleven flights had to be cancelled, Vienna Airport announced on Saturday. Due to the breakdown, the airlines Ryanair, Wizz Air, Eurowings, Turkish Airlines and Vueling had to carry out their check-in and boarding processes manually. By Friday evening, however, everything was back to normal. In today’s press release, the Vienna Airport management thanked the staff for their efforts and the passengers for their patience.
Graz Airport, which was also affected by the problems yesterday, is still experiencing delays today. At Klagenfurt Airport, however, everything is back to schedule.
Hospitals affected
In Austria’s hospitals, too, everything was largely running smoothly again by Friday afternoon, after hospitals in Vorarlberg, Tyrol and Burgenland were affected by technical outages. The Austrian Medical Association (ÖÄK) emphasized on Saturday that the IT problems had shown the importance of data security. “These large-scale outages have shown us how vulnerable our systems can be and how dependent we are on digital solutions,” said Harald Schlögel, executive vice president of the ÖÄK. “Even if the problems in Austrian hospitals and practices have been limited, every postponed operation is one too many.”
Critical infrastructure was spared
Schlögel therefore appealed to the current and future federal governments to set the highest standards for data protection and data security for health data. “In addition, when implementing new digital solutions, it is not only important to involve doctors as service providers who work with these tools every day. Maximum quality and security requirements must be set right from the start,” said Schlögel. One step would be to create a national competence center that could set and check the necessary quality and certification standards. “Yesterday’s incidents underline how important analog backups are for hospitals. This way, patient care can be secured,” said ÖÄK Vice President Harald Mayer, who was pleased that the IT problems in hospitals could be kept to a minimum and that care remained completely unscathed.
Aside from the hospitals, the critical infrastructure and large companies in Austria were spared from major IT problems yesterday. The glitch hit companies worldwide that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system on Friday. According to the US cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, the cause was a faulty update to their anti-virus program Falcon. The global impact was enormous: airlines and airports around the world had IT problems, so that some take-offs and landings had to be cancelled. Hospitals had to postpone operations, television stations could not broadcast, and cash register systems in supermarkets failed.