FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Global tech shutdown A glitch in a software update on Friday grounded flights, took banks and media offline and disrupted hospitals, small businesses and other services, highlighting the fragility of a digitalized world that relies on just a handful of providers.
The issues with an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that affected computers running Microsoft Windows were not the result of a hacking incident or cyberattack, CrowdStrike said, apologizing and saying a fix was on the way.
But the unrest continued and intensified several hours later.
Long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at a time when many travelers are heading out for summer vacations. Hospitals and clinics had problems with their booking systems and non-urgent surgeries were canceled. Several U.S. television stations also stopped broadcasting local news early on Friday.
Saskia Ettinghaus, a member of Germany’s Olympic diving team, was among those stranded at Berlin airport.
“We were on our way to Paris for the Olympics but for now we’re stuck here,” Ettinghaus said.
Other athletes, spectators, uniforms and certificates heading to Paris were delayed, but organisers said the disruptions were limited and ticket sales and the torch relay were not affected.
An ominous reminder of vulnerability
“This is a deeply disturbing demonstration of the vulnerability of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciarán Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former director of the UK National Cyber Security Centre.
Cyber expert James Boa said the real harm from the outage would be that it would render unavailable the systems people rely on in times of crisis. Hospitals, for example, would struggle to coordinate appointments, and people who need treatment might not be able to get it, leading to deaths, he said.
“All of these systems are powered by the same software,” Boer says, “and we’ve disseminated these tools so widely that when things inevitably go wrong, and they will, as we’ve seen, the failure will be massive.”
“The problem will last for a while, we can’t expect it to be resolved anytime soon,” said Claudia Plattner, head of Germany’s IT security agency. It was difficult to predict exactly when all systems would be up and running, but “it shouldn’t take more than a few hours,” she added.
“The CrowdStrike update caused downtime for many Windows systems around the world,” Microsoft spokesman Frank X. Shaw confirmed in an email. The company previously said Social Media Platform X The company said it was working to “mitigate the impact” and was “seeing positive trends in service availability.”
In an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized for the outage, saying, “We are deeply sorry for the impact this has had on our customers, travelers and all those affected by this incident, including our company.”
“We know what the issues are” and are working to improve them, Kurtz said.
He said that “only Microsoft operating systems were affected,” but that it did not occur on all Microsoft Windows systems.
Shares of the Austin, Texas-based company were down about 10% at the start of trading on Friday.
“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of Microsoft port crashes related to Falcon Sensor, one of the company’s products used to block online attacks,” a recording played on the company’s customer service line said.
Broadcasting station loses power, surgery is delayed, ‘blue screen of death’
Meanwhile, governments and businesses around the world scrambled to respond.
The White House said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the outage and that his team was in contact with the company and other affected entities.
New Zealand’s Acting Prime Minister David Seymour said: I said it with X Authorities are “moving quickly to understand the potential impact,” he said, adding that there was no information to indicate it was a cybersecurity threat.
He added that the issue was causing “inconvenience” to citizens and businesses.
Trading continued on the Milan stock exchange, but the FTSE MIB index of Italian blue-chip shares was not tallied for an hour.
An increase in long delays reported at airports on Friday morning, most of which were blamed on problems with airlines’ reservation systems.
In the US, United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Airlines have said at least some flights have resumed after severe disruptions, but delays will continue.
UK airlines and trains are also affected, with waiting times longer than usual.
In Germany, flights were halted for several hours at Berlin Brandenburg airport after problems with passengers checking in, groundings were halted at Zurich airport and flights were also disrupted in Hungary, Italy and Turkey.
Dutch airline KLM said it had been “forced to suspend the majority” of its operations.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport warned that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The chaotic morning coincided with one of the airport’s busiest days of the year.
Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where flights were operating but online check-in services and self-service booths were unavailable, causing long queues and leaving some passengers stranded, while passengers stood in long queues at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport after a global power outage caused flights to be cancelled.
Power outages in New England caused delays at airports and canceled appointments at some hospitals.
A spokesman for Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham Hospital, the state’s largest health system, said all non-urgent surgeries, procedures and appointments scheduled for Friday were canceled because of the outage. The emergency department remains open and care for patients inside the hospital is not affected.
Australia has been particularly affected by the blackouts
Australia appears to be one of the worst hit countries, with outages occurring around the world, with outages reported on the Downdetector site including internet and phone providers NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo banks, Virgin Australia, Qantas and Telstra.
National news stations, including state broadcaster ABC and Sky News Australia, were blacked out on television and radio for hours, with some news anchors broadcasting online from darkened offices in front of computers displaying the “blue screen of death.”
Problems have also been reported in hospitals in several countries.
Britain’s National Health Service said the outage caused problems at most clinics across England. NHS England said in a statement that the problem was affecting booking and patient record systems used across the public health system.
Several hospitals in northern Germany cancelled all elective surgeries scheduled for Friday, but emergency care was unaffected.
Shipping was also disrupted. Baltic Hub, a major container hub in the Polish port city of Gdansk on the Baltic Sea coast, said it was battling problems from the global outage.
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Kurtenbach reported from Bangkok and Graham McRae from Wellington, New Zealand. Associated Press reporters around the world contributed.
