Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage

Modern health care depends on digital infrastructure. Widespread technology outages affecting health care delivery organizations may impact clinical care.

To determine the availability of health care delivery organization internet-connected networks before, during, and after the faulty CrowdStrike software update of July 19, 2024.

This cross-sectional study measured availability of health care delivery organization networks by performing scans on internet address ranges and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) end points corresponding to individual hospitals, spanning various sizes, geographic range, and organizational types, assessing responsivity to scans 2 weeks before, during, and 2 weeks after the CrowdStrike update. Hospitals affiliated with US-based health care delivery organizations that used the Epic electronic health record and that had publicly observable internet services, including FHIR end points, were included. Data were analyzed from July 19, 2024, to May 17, 2025.

A widely distributed faulty software update for enterprise cybersecurity software distributed on July 19, 2024, which, when installed on computers, resulted in a system crash.

The primary outcome was loss of response to internet scanning techniques indicating computer system downtime. A secondary analysis was performed on unresponsive domains attempting to identify the function of the network services provided.

Among 2232 hospitals with available data, loss of response to internet scanning techniques immediately following the CrowdStrike update was observed in 759 hospitals (34.0%). A total of 1098 distinct network services with outages were identified, of which 631 (57.5%) were unable to be classified, 239 (21.8%) were direct patient-facing services, 169 (15.4%) were operationally relevant services, and 58 (5.3%) were research-related services.

This cross-sectional study of US hospitals found that a widespread technology outage was associated with outages in patient-facing network services integral to care delivery. These findings suggest that internet measurement techniques may be useful for surveillance and study of critical digital health care infrastructure.