The internet outage that continues to impact various services around the world including British Columbia might delay cheque depositing for a provincial support program and has temporarily impacted 50,000 devices across the provincial health care system.
Premier David Eby said Friday (July 19) said British Columbians counting on seeing their B.C. Family Benefit might experience a slight delay. Canada Revenue Agency administers the program and the outage may be affecting CRA.
"So there may be some delay in seeing that in your bank account," Eby said.
About 340,000 low-to-middle-income family households receive the B.C. Family Benefit with deposits going out around July 20. This year's provincial budget included a one-time boost of 25 per cent to the benefit — an increase of up to $445 over 12 months — and extended it to an additional 66,000 families from the previous year.
The outage has also caused delays at the Ministry of Children and Family Development's call centre, which remains operational with delays expected to be resolved later today.
Eby was speaking at an unrelated event in Vancouver, where he and B.C.'s Health Minister Adrian Dix were giving a run down of provincial operations, which the outage has affected.
Eby said key emergency services like police (RCMP, Vancouver Police Department and other municipal police forces) as well as paramedic and ambulance services remain so far unaffected by the outage.
Eby also said that the operational centre of B.C.'s Emergency Management Ministry remains fully operational, adding that B.C. Wildfire Service has not reported any impacts.
"(Which) is very positive news given the challenging the wildfire situation we are in currently and that looks to get worse over the next few days," he said.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows caused the widespread outage, which started to impact B.C.'s health care system in the late hours of July 18.
Dix said IT teams worked through the night to get systems up and running again to minimize disruptions affecting a wide variety of services.
"The diagnostic tests to lab work to the work in scheduling surgeries, all of that briefly went to paper and back and our teams did an exceptional job," Dix said.
He added that everything was done to avoid impacting patients, but acknowledged some urgent primary care centres were delayed taking patients by about seven minutes.
Overall, 30,000 devices were impacted in the two health authorities covering Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, with another 20,000 impacted across Vancouver Island and the two health authorities covering southern and northern B.C.
Eby said provincial authorities across government will review the incident and whether they could take steps in the future to minimize the impacts of such incidents.
"This is a routine thing when we do this, but this is obviously not a routine incident," he said.
