By Lucy Adautin
A sweeping tech outage on Friday disrupted operations across various sectors, grounding flights, halting broadcasts, and impacting everything from banking to healthcare.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air all grounded flights, citing communication breakdowns.
This decision followed an announcement from Microsoft that it had resolved a cloud services outage affecting several low-cost carriers, though a direct connection between these events remains unclear.
United Airlines released a statement: “A third-party software outage is affecting computer systems worldwide, including ours. As we work to restore systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
Australia’s government reported that media, banks, and telecom companies experienced outages linked to an issue at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. An alert from Crowdstrike revealed that the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash, displaying the infamous “Blue Screen of Death.” The alert, issued at 05:30 GMT on Friday, included a manual workaround to address the issue. Crowdstrike has not commented on the situation.
Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator, Michelle McGuinness, confirmed there was no evidence to suggest a cybersecurity incident.
The fallout from the outages was extensive. The travel industry was severely affected, with airports in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, and various Spanish cities experiencing system failures and delays. International airlines, including Ryanair, Europe’s largest by passenger numbers, reported booking system disruptions and other issues.
In the UK, doctors’ booking systems went offline, and Sky News, a major broadcaster, was off the air, apologizing for their inability to transmit live.
Banks and financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa warned clients of service disruptions. LSEG Group reported an outage of its data and news platform Workspace.
Amazon’s AWS cloud service provider announced it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”
The precise cause of the widespread outages remains uncertain, and it is unclear if all disruptions are linked to Crowdstrike’s software issues or if there are additional problems at play.
