Global Tech Outage Disrupts Airlines, Banks, Healthcare, and Public Transit

A major technology outage grounded flights, hampered public transit systems and disrupted operations at banks and hospitals worldwide on Friday. The incident, blamed on a faulty system update by a cybersecurity firm, caused widespread disruption.

CrowdStrike, a U.S. firm used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, reported that a recent content update had a defect impacting Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. The company clarified that this was “not a security incident or cyberattack.”

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, apologized for the disruptions in a post on X (formerly Twitter), stating that the issue had been identified, isolated, and fixed. CrowdStrike is “working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.” Microsoft also confirmed that “the underlying cause has been fixed,” and that impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services had recovered, though the company continues to monitor the issue.

Impact in the U.S.:

Thousands of flights were canceled on Friday morning, with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines grounding flights less than an hour after Microsoft resolved a cloud-services-related outage that affected several low-cost carriers.

“Every line is long,” said Chance Ortego, 31, whose flight to New York was canceled on Friday morning.

Public transit systems in the U.S. reported impacts. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C., stated that its “website and some of our internal systems are currently down,” but assured that trains and buses were running as scheduled. In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority noted that its buses and trains were unaffected, though “some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline due to a worldwide technical outage.”

Global Impact:

• The outages disrupted the London Stock Exchange.
• Major train delays occurred in the U.K.
• British broadcaster Sky News went off air.
• Medical facilities in Europe and the U.S. had to cancel some services.
• Airports in Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India experienced disruptions.

Additional Developments:

• Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts on Friday due to the global tech outage.
• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated on X that it is “closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines,” and several airlines “have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved.”
• Dubai International Airport reported on X that it is operating normally following “a global system outage that affected the check-in process for some airlines.” The affected airlines “promptly switched to an alternate system, allowing normal check-in operations to resume swiftly.”

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via USAToday