0

Widespread technology outage disrupts flights, banks, and companies around the world

Travelers wait in Terminal 1 for check-in at Hamburg Airport, in Hamburg, Germany, Friday July 19, 2024 as a widespread Microsoft outage disrupted flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday. (Bodo Marks/dpa via AP)

Travelers wait in Terminal 1 for check-in at Hamburg Airport, in Hamburg, Germany, Friday July 19, 2024 as a widespread Microsoft outage disrupted flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday. (Bodo Marks/dpa via AP)

By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY, ELAINE KURTENBACH and DAVID McHUGH Associated Press

A global technology outage grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack — and that a fix was on the way. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

But hours after the problem was first detected, the disarray continued — and escalated.

Long lines formed at airports in the US, Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at a time when many travelers are heading away on summer vacations. News outlets in Australia — where telecommunications were severely affected — were pushed off air for hours. Hospitals and doctor's offices had problems with their appointment systems, while banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages to their payment system or websites and apps.

At Hong Kong's airport, Yvonne Lee, 24, said she only found out her flight to Phuket in Thailand was postponed to Saturday when she arrived at the airport, saying the way it was handled would "affect the image of Hong Kong's airport very much."

Her already short five-day trip would now have to be further shortened, she said.

Some athletes and spectators descending on Paris ahead of the Olympics were delayed as was the arrival of their uniforms and accreditations, but Games organisers said disruptions were limited and didn't affect ticketing or the torch relay.

A disturbing reminder of vulnerability

"This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world's core internet infrastructure," said Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and former Head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre.

DownDectector, which tracks user-reported disruptions to internet services, recorded that airlines, payment platforms and online shopping websites across the world were affected — although the disruption appeared piecemeal and was apparently related to whether the companies used Microsoft cloud-based services.

Cyber expert James Bore said real harm would be caused by the outage because systems we've come to rely on at critical times are not going to be available. Hospitals, for example, will struggle to sort out appointments and those who need care may not get it.

"There are going to be deaths because of this. It's inevitable,'' Bore said. "We've got so many systems tied up with this."

Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was "working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact" and that they were "observing a positive trend in service availability."

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

CrowdStrike said in an emailed statement that the company "is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts."

It said: "This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

The Austin, Texas-based company's Nasdaq-traded shares were down nearly 15% in premarket trading early Friday.

A recording playing on its customer service line said, "CrowdStrike is aware of the reports of crashes on Microsoft ports related to the Falcon sensor," referring to one of its products used to block online attacks.

Meanwhile, governments, officials and companies across the world scrambled to respond.

New Zealand's acting prime minister, David Seymour, said on X that officials in the country were "moving at pace to understand the potential impacts," adding that he had no information indicating it was a cybersecurity threat.

The issue was causing "inconvenience" for the public and businesses, he added.

On the Milan stock exchange, the FTSE MIB index of blue-chip Italian stocks could not be compiled for an hour, though trading continued.

Major delays reported at airports grew on Friday morning, with most attributing the problems in booking systems of individual airlines.

In the US, the FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded.

Airlines and railways in the UK were also affected, with longer than usual waiting times.

In Germany, Berlin-Brandenburg Airport halted flights for several hours due to difficulties in checking in passengers, while landings at Zurich airport were suspended and flights in Hungary, Italy and Turkey disrupted.

The Dutch carrier KLM said it had been "forced to suspend most" 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 busiest days of the year for Schiphol.

Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled — although flights were still operating.

In India, Hong Kong and Thailand, many airlines were forced to manually check in passengers. An airline in Kenya was also reporting disruption.

Australia bears brunt of outages in Asia

While the outages were being experienced worldwide, Australia appeared to be severely affected by the issue. Disruption reported on the site DownDetector included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.

National news outlets — including public broadcaster ABC and Sky News Australia — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels for hours. Some news anchors went on air online from dark offices, in front of computers showing "blue screens of death."

Hospitals in several countries also reported problems.

Britain's National Health Service said the outage caused problems at most doctors' offices across England. NHS England said in a statement said the glitch was affecting the appointment and patient record system used across the public health system.

Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, but emergency care was unaffected.

Israel said its hospitals and post office operations were disrupted.

In South Africa, at least one major bank said it was experiencing nationwide service disruptions as customers reported they were unable to make payments using their bank cards in stores. The New Zealand banks ASB and Kiwibank said their services were down as well.

Shipping was disrupted too: A major container hub in the Baltic port of Gdansk, Poland, the Baltic Hub, said it was battling problems resulting from the global system outage.


Comments

LastManStanding 5 months, 1 week ago

Possibly the worst case of testing in production in history. Maybe people will finally abandon Winshit and learn how to Linux. There is literally zero reason to not run a mainstream Linux distro unless you absolutely have to use a program with zero compatibility.

ThisIsOurs 5 months, 1 week ago

"testing in production".

It's what most companies do. Those that take a little more care test 2 transactions and say, its working!

bahamianson 5 months, 1 week ago

So, we had a security incident. So we had a virus that closed the world down for a year or more, when will we have a virus that shits the world computers down? It seems like it is only a matter of time. Maybe, we should go half and half. Half digital, half analog. I was in the airport today and a lot of passengers could not get food because they only had a credit card. I had cash and a credit card. I ate.

ExposedU2C 5 months, 1 week ago

Both Linux and Mac OS were born from UNIX. My children thankfully enlightened me many years ago why I should despise any and every thing to do with Bill Gates. Businesses worldwide need to wake up to the many security issues and privacy vulnerabilities associated with both Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Apple really should re-think its policy of allowing Microsoft to continue its dominance of the business market place. Apple also needs to re-think the merit of its contractual arrangements with Google that annoy the hell out of the users of Apple products.

ThisIsOurs 5 months ago

Though this case wasnt a virus, the truth about both viruses and thieves is, they go where the money is. If all the world were on Macs that's where the viruses would be. People just need sufficient motivation to break a system, money, politics, cyber war etc

With almost 90% on Microsoft it's a perfect target.

ExposedU2C 5 months ago

The jury is actually still out on whether this was indeed a cyber-attack by a state sponsored closely-knit group of attackers. CrowdStrike's CEO was much too quick with his dismissal of the possibility of vulnerabilities in their security patch roll-out systems having been exploited by cyber-attackers. Obviously CrowdStrike stands to lose a lot of business if it has fallen victim to the very thing that its products are intended to protect its customers from.

Senior IT people at Google, Oracle, Adobe and others have all said it would (should) have taken CrowdStrike considerably longer than a couple of hours to fully investigate and rule out a cyber-attack. Many suspect there may be a cover up going on here by the US intelligence agencies and DHS given that this CrowdStrike incident points out serious outage vulnerabilities in most government systems around the world as well as the dangers imposed by Microsoft's global monopoly.

Sign in to comment