While the international IT outage caused by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike—and subsequently Microsoft—has grounded airlines and forced cancelations at hospitals, the experience from the meltdown appeared different at large pharma companies.
About 5% to 10% of computers at Biogen have been affected by the CrowdStrike issue, but the Big Biotech has “not identified any business continuity concerns,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma.
“Our global IT team is in the process of restoring impacted systems and proactively checking for any other impacts,” the spokesperson added.
Given the global scale of large pharma companies and how the CrowdStrike update has also disrupted some widely used services from Microsoft, it’d be understandable that some workers or operations in the life sciences industry may be affected. But so far, it’s unclear if the problems have crippled any key operations such as manufacturing, clinical research and patient access to drugs.
In a statement on Friday, Amgen acknowledged that it’s a CrowdStrike customer.
“We are currently assessing impact and are working to recover impacted systems as quickly as possible,” the California company said.
The widespread IT outage has been linked to a software update from CrowdStrike, which caused Windows to malfunction. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack, and that the issue “has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.” He also confirmed that Mac and Linux systems were not affected.
The Microsoft outage affected GSK, and the British drugmaker has been working to solve the problem, Fierce Pharma has learned. The company declined to comment.
Fellow British drugmaker AstraZeneca isn't seeing “any significant impact,” the company said in a statement, stressing that its supply chain is “robust.”
“We continue to assess and monitor the situation closely,” AZ said.
Other companies confirmed that they are not CrowdStrike customers.
“Novartis is not using CrowdStrike software, and we are monitoring the situation closely,” a Novartis spokesperson told Fierce Pharma. “We have business continuity plans in place.”
The two diabetes and weight loss giants, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, both reported business as usual. Sanofi and Roche’s Genentech said their operations were not affected because they don’t use the related software or IT solutions.
Meanwhile, several healthcare facilities such as Mass General Brigham have reported disruptions to providers’ access to clinical systems, including patient health records and scheduling, Fierce Healthcare reports. The health system canceled all non-urgent medical visits Friday.