Across the world, critical businesses and services including airlines, hospitals, train networks and TV stations, were disrupted on Friday by a global tech outage affecting Microsoft users.
In many countries, flights have been grounded, workers could not get access to their systems and, in some cases, customers have not been able to make card payments in stores. While some of the problems were resolved within hours, many businesses, websites and airlines continued to struggle to recover.
What happened?
A series of outages rippled across the globe as information displays, login systems and broadcasting networks went dark.
The problem affecting the majority of services was caused by a flawed update by CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity firm, whose systems are intended to protect users from hackers. Microsoft said on Friday that it was aware of an issue affecting machines running “CrowdStrike Falcon.”
But Microsoft had also said there was an earlier outage affecting U.S. users of Azure, its cloud service system. Some users may have been affected by both. Even as a fix was sent out by CrowdStrike, some systems were still affected into the U.S. morning as businesses needed to make manual updates to their systems to resolve the issue.
George Kurtz, the president and chief executive of CrowdStrike, said on Friday morning that “it could be some time for some systems” to recover.
What was affected?
It is more apt to ask what was not affected. Everything from airlines to banks to retailers in many countries were hit.
In Australia, passengers were stuck in long lines at Sydney airport as information screens went blank, and programming was disrupted at the national broadcaster. Airports in Britain, Germany and Taiwan had long delays at check-ins and flights were delayed or canceled. At an airport in South Korea, handwritten boarding passes were being slowly handed out.
Flights continued to be disrupted at some U.S. airports into the morning because of the cascading effect of flight delays and cancellations. . The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that ground stops and delays would be “intermittent” at some airports as airlines grapple with residual technology issues.
The outage affected emergency 911 lines in multiple states, the U.S. Emergency Alert System said on social media — but most if not all of the emergency system problems appeared to be resolving themselves by midmorning.
A few hospitals in Germany said they would cancel elective procedures; and in Britain, some doctors in the National Health Service were unable to gain access to systems. Sky News, a major news channel in Britain, could not operate, while customers at some Waitrose supermarkets were unable to make card payments.
At some banks, including JPMorgan Chase, there were delays in processing trades because bankers could not log into their work systems. Amid the myriad problems, people at Disneyland Paris theme park were also affected, as screens displaying wait times for rides went down.
But the problems were not uniform. London’s Heathrow Airport said that its flights were still operating. The London Stock Exchange said that it could not publish news updates but the exchange, where trades take place, was working as normal. The auction system at the Norwegian central bank was briefly interrupted, but other major central banks, the European Central Bank and Bank of England, said there was no effect on their systems.
In some cases, issues were resolved relatively quickly. In Ukraine, Sense Bank and the mobile operator Vodafone reported brief problems with their services. At Dubai International Airport, two airlines switched to alternative systems, allowing operations to resume. At about 5 a.m. E.D.T., American Airlines said it had re-established its operations, and a few hours later Delta Air Lines said it was flying again.
Major grocery chains in the United States appeared largely unaffected. The Texas-based grocery chain H-E-B said all of its stores were open and operating normally, and a spokeswoman for the supermarket company Ahold Delhaize, which owns brands including Giant, Food Lion and Hannaford, also said stores were operating as usual.
Who’s to blame?
Mr. Kurtz said CrowdStrike had sent out a system update that had a bug in it that caused issues for Microsoft users. He had earlier said in a post on X that Mac and Linux users were not affected.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he said. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Mr. Kurtz said on NBC’s “Today” show that his company took responsibility for the software bug that caused the outage. He warned the fix could take some time to put in place.
Microsoft also provided suggestions to users to help resolve the issue, including restoring backup systems, on a services page that tracks issues with Azure.
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