A major cyber outage has grounded flights and disrupted businesses and media organizations globally.
The technology glitch caused chaos on Friday morning, with Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines reporting impacts on their operations. Emergency response systems were down at police agencies and healthcare providers in Phoenix, Arizona, forcing manual dispatch of police and ambulance services, according to The Arizona Republic.
Banks and financial services firms from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, according to multiple reports from medical officials on X. Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters, was off the air and apologized for being unable to transmit live. Manchester United had to postpone a scheduled ticket release.
The glitch was caused by a faulty update from CrowdStrike, a U.S. cybersecurity technology company based in Texas, in a single content update for Windows hosts.
This update led to Windows computers and tablets crashing and displaying a blue screen, known as the “Blue Screen of Death.” Over half of Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike software, the firm stated in a promotional video this year.
“The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed,” George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, posted on X. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”
“Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.”
Delta Air Lines announced early Friday morning that all flights were paused as they addressed the technology issue. Allegiant Air also grounded flights.
United stated it is now resuming some flights, but customers can expect schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday. The airline issued a waiver to facilitate changes to travel plans via United.com or the United app.
American Airlines reported that it has been able to “safely re-establish our operation.”
The FAA said all flights, regardless of destination, have been affected.
Airports in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India reported that some airlines were checking in passengers manually due to the outage.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s busiest, was affected, while airline Iberia operated manually at airports until electronic check-in counters and online check-ins were reactivated. There were some delays but no flight cancellations. London Gatwick and Air France-KLM also experienced issues.
The technology error was separate from a problem Microsoft faced overnight with its cloud services, including Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams video conferencing.
Microsoft announced via X that they were “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
Microsoft stated that service went down for some customers in the central United States around 6 p.m. ET, affecting service management operations and connectivity or availability of services.
They also mentioned on their service health status page and X that they are “continuing to see an improvement in service availability across multiple Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re closely monitoring our telemetry data to ensure this upward trend continues as our mitigation actions progress.”
Officials have not indicated how long it will take to resolve the outage, but an update is expected later today.
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