PORTLAND, Ore. — Blood donation centers are among the industries impacted during the global CrowdStrike outage that temporarily shut down airports and emergency systems citywide.
During the Friday morning outage, Bloodworks Northwest estimates it lost around 250 donations at a critical time of the year, said Juan Cotto, director of government affairs at Bloodworks Northwest.
Bloodworks computer system that registers blood donations was out. Without access, Cotto said it "slowed down the whole process." But, by the afternoon the organization's IT department was able to get everything back online.
Cotto said it's a significant loss. Typically, Bloodworks sees around 1,000 people a day, but usually only a fraction of them are able to donate. He said a number of people need to be referred to donate another day, due to iron levels being low or other factors preventing them from donating that day.
So, with the normal amount of referrals plus the donations lost during the tech outage, Cotto said it resulted in "a pretty good chunk of donations for a day," particularly at this time of year.
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it's known as the "100 Deadliest Days," where there is often a spike in accidents and a drop in blood drives.
"So the high school and colleges which we depend upon for about a third of our blood supply during the year they are now out and then people are going on traveling and trips," Cotto said.
Since Friday morning's tech outage, Cotto said they've already been able to reschedule all the donations that were lost. But, he asks that people look to donate blood while still enjoying the summer.
People can sign-up to donate blood on Bloodworks Northwest's website.