A software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally on Friday, grounding flights, forcing some broadcasters off air and hitting services from banking to healthcare.
An update to a product offered by global cyberscurity firm CrowdStrike (CRWD.O), opens new tab appeared to be the trigger, affecting customers using Microsoft’s (MSFT.O), opens new tab Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.
The boss of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike apologised for the disruption caused by its software update in an interview with US broadcaster NBC News.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies,” George Kurtz says.
Kurtz said on social media platform X that the company was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” and that a fix was being deployed.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said in the post.
Early on Friday, major U.S. airlines – American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab, Delta Airlines (DAL.N), opens new tab and United Airlines (UAL.O), opens new tab – grounded flights, while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.
Banks and financial services companies from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and traders across markets spoke of problems with executing transaction.
“We are having the mother of all global market outages,” one trader said.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports posted on X by medical officials said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters was off air, apologising for being unable to transmit live, and soccer club Manchester United said on X that it had to postpone a scheduled release of tickets.
Tesla and X boss Elon Musk earlier branded today’s outage as the “biggest IT fail ever.”
In terms of immediate impact on people, it’s hard to think of a worse one. The most recent mega outage was when Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, fell over in 2021. That affected billions of social media users as well as millions of businesses.
But this Crowdstrike outage is on another level. The closest case we’ve had is all the way back in 2017 when two deliberate cyberattacks took hundreds of thousands of computers offline, and had a massive impact on NHS services.
There were around 110,000 commercial flights scheduled across the world today – as of 11:00 BST, 1,390 have been cancelled, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
Here’s a national breakdown – we hope to have up-to-date UK figures soon:
- US: 512 flights cancelled so far
- Germany: 92
- India: 56
- Italy: 45
- In Canada: 21
Written with agency reports