Canadian broadcasters say Friday’s Microsoft outage caused minimal disruption, for the most part, in some cases due to the ingenuity of on-air staff.
Triggered early Friday morning by a sensor configuration update to Windows systems released by cybersecurity platform, CrowdStrike, the resulting logic error prompted a system crash and “blue screen of death” (BSOD) on impacted systems.
According to CrowdStrike, customers running the company’s Falcon sensor software for Windows were susceptible. Described as one of the worst IT outages in history, an estimated 8.5 million computers were hit worldwide.
Among the broadcasters impacted was CBC/Radio-Canada, which did not immediately confirm reports that the Dalet asset management system was among its software workflow tools affected, impacting ingesting, editing and publishing in some instances.
The public broadcaster told Broadcast Dialogue some radio and television programs did not air as scheduled and were replaced with other programming.
At Cogeco’s The Beat 92.5 (CKBE-FM) in Montreal, morning show hosts Natasha Gargiulo, Mark Bergman, and Catherine Duranceau arrived to find no access to computers.
“What a morning,” Gargiiulo wrote in a post to Instagram. “We walked in at 5 a.m. to find all systems down EVERYWHERE! No computers, no music, and no tech that was working to get us on…It was a challenge making the show run smoothly given our resources down due to loss of software, but the show must go on and it did! Thank you Montreal for all the supportive calls, and to the team behind the scenes who work magic to make everything seem ‘normal!'”
Rogers said some of its employees were unable to login or access applications with minimal impact on the media side overall.
“Our TV broadcasts aren’t affected while a few of our radio stations are airing repeat programming,” offered a Rogers Sports & Media spokesperson. We’re working with our vendor partners to resolve the impact of the global IT issue.”
At Pattison Media it was business as usual, with the exception of Dayforce, the software it uses to manage human resources.
Among the broadcasters impacted globally were ABC News Australia, Sky News UK, Sky Sports News, and Audacy in the U.S., with some radio and television stations dark for several hours.
Credit rating agency DBRS Morningstar said Friday’s events are not anticipated to have a lasting impact on the broadcast sector, despite reports the outage could result in $1 to 2 billion in losses across the airline, health, finance and retail sectors.
“Given the selective nature of outages experienced by some broadcasters, we would anticipate a relatively modest amount of advertising make goods,” the agency stated in a report. “Further, as this was not a cyber security attack, we don’t expect a longer impact on the broadcaster brands in their respective markets.”
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