Small businesses grapple with global tech outages created by CrowdStrike

Businesses from airlines to hospitals have been grappling with a faulty software update that caused technological havoc worldwide on Friday, and its repercussions continued through the weekend.

An owner of a consumer insights research firm couldn't pay her employees, make Friday's deadline to sign a contract for a new business or send key research to a key client. A psychiatrist, who runs a virtual mental health practice in Maryland, saw his business hobbled as some of his virtual assistants and therapists couldn't either make phone calls or log on to their computers. And a restaurant owner in New York City was worried about how he was going to pay his vendors and his workers.

Businesses from airlines to hospitals have been grappling with a faulty software update that caused technological havoc worldwide on Friday, and its repercussions continued through the weekend. The breadth of the outages highlighted the fragility of a digitized world dependent on a few providers for key computing services.

But the problem appeared to divide those affected into haves and have-nots. Major customers of Microsoft and CrowdStrike are getting IT support to resolve the issues, but many smaller businesses whose Windows PCs may have received the problematic update are still struggling.

Take Tsvetta Kaleynska, owner and founder of the Manhattan-based consumer insights company RILA Global Consulting, which has Fortune 500 clients. As of Saturday, she resolved the payroll issue and she got an extension until Monday on the research project. But the prospective client will not move forward with the new contract, cutting her annual earnings by nearly 25 per cent, she estimated. The problem: she couldn't sign the contract because Docusign, which runs on Microsoft software affected by the faulty update, was down.

“If I were part of a big company, then I would be able to delegate and get support from computer science or security services,” Kaleynska said. “But as a small business owner, I am depending only on myself. It's pretty devastating."

On top of Kaleynska's business issues, she had to bring her ill daughter to a local hospital Friday because the hospital's phone lines were down.

Kaleynska, an immigrant from Bulgaria who became a U.S. citizen in 2023, said she's learned a hard lesson: “Our lives are very fragile because they’re based on technology, and we depend on technology.”