Peace Bridge, other Niagara border crossings affected by CrowdStrike IT outage

The Peace Bridge was backed up further than usual on Friday as a global tech outage caused problems at the border.

Airlines, hospitals, banking and some broadcasters were also affected by the outage.

The problem crashed Windows machines and servers, sending them into a loop of recovery so that they couldn’t restart.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the problem was caused by a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows–which was neither a security incident nor a cyberattack–and affected Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) spokesperson Jacqueline Roby said traffic crossing Niagara’s international borders was slowed due to a “partial systems outage,” a result of the CrowdStrike outage.

“The CBSA worked urgently with its partners and service providers to mitigate any disruptions and restore full service as quickly as possible,” Roby said. “We are continuing to monitor further potential impacts.”

Delays to cross into the U.S. at the Peace Bridge peaked at several hours on Friday according to the peacebridge.com website.

In a statement posted to its website Friday afternoon, CrowdStrike said “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

In a post to the company’s Reddit page, CrowdStrike engineers advised the following fix for individual systems:

• Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
• Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
• Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
• Boot the host normally.

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