Microsoft IT outage goes live today: Crowdstrike blamed for “bringing down” Windows amid chaos for flights, banks, hospitals

A full report on the outage can be found here.

Adam Smith, an industry expert at the British Chartered Institute of IT (BCS), warned that it could take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored.

“This fix needs to be applied to many computers around the world. If the computer is experiencing a blue screen or an infinite loop, it will be much more difficult to fix and could take days or even weeks,” he said.

“Microsoft Windows is not the main OS for mission-critical systems. It’s Linux. So things could have been a lot worse.”

Earlier, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company “deeply regrets” the incident, but warned it could take “some time” for systems to be restored.

Speaking in an interview with US network NBC’s Today Show, Kurtz said the incident was not a cyber attack, but acknowledged that it would take “some time” for all systems to be back to normal, despite CrowdStrike identifying the bug that caused the problem and rolling out a fix.

“We are deeply sorry for the impact this has had on our customers, travelers and all those affected by this,” Kurtz said.

“We have been in contact with customers throughout the night and working with them. Many customers have their systems restarted and up and running as we have fixed the issue on our end,” he said.

“We are currently working on some of the systems that are not restored, so it may take some time for systems that do not automatically restore. However, our mission is to fully restore all our customers, and we will not relax until we have everyone back on track. We will continue to protect our customers and keep bad actors out of our systems.”

Asked if he thought an outage of this magnitude was possible, the CrowdStrike founder added: “Software is a very complex world, with a lot of interactions, and staying ahead of your adversaries is a tough job.”

“The President has been briefed on the CrowdStrike outage, and his team is in contact with CrowdStrike and affected entities,” a White House statement said. “His team is working across agencies to provide sector-by-sector updates throughout the day and stands by to provide assistance as needed.”

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s public affairs chief, said CrowdStrike was to blame.

“Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update caused numerous Windows systems to go down around the world,” he said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We are actively working to help our customers recover.”

(Many reports, including ours, have called this a “Microsoft outage” because it affects Windows PCs and is a Microsoft error that appears when it occurs. But the issue doesn’t actually appear to be Microsoft’s fault, which is probably why Microsoft’s statements have been so explicit about blaming CrowdStrike.)

More than 100 flights to, from and within the UK have so far been cancelled due to the CrowdStrike IT outage.

The Independent looked at the UK’s major airports and found that London Heathrow, Manchester and Edinburgh airports were the worst affected.

But unusually, the latest wave of cancellations are with continental European airlines.

London Heathrow: 58 flights cancelled British Airways has so far suspended 22 flights, including three round trips to Amsterdam and Edinburgh. Zurich, Geneva and Berlin are also affected. Lufthansa’s budget subsidiary Eurowings has suspended 16 flights to Heathrow, including round trips from Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Stuttgart. Lufthansa has suspended two flights between Frankfurt and Heathrow. Vueling (Barcelona), Iberia (Madrid), Delta Air Lines (Atlanta) and Virgin Atlantic (New York-JFK) are also affected.

Edinburgh: 26 flights cancelled. Eurowings has suspended flights from Cologne and Düsseldorf, and KLM has cancelled two round-trip flights from Amsterdam.

Manchester: 12 flights cancelled Ryanair has suspended flights to Beauvais and Brussels London Gatwick: 10 flights cancelled Vueling is the airline most affected so far, having suspended flights to Florence, Asturias and Paris.

London Stansted: 8 flights cancelled Ryanair experienced a six-hour delay to Berlin and flights to Berlin, Dortmund, Zaragoza and Lodz were also cancelled.

London Luton: Wizz Air cancels eight flights to Athens, Budapest and Warsaw.

Businesses have reported that a global IT outage has affected software, causing payroll processing to fail.

The IT outage caused queues and delays at airports, disrupted general medical services and made it impossible to make payments in some shops.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is “actively working” to fix a “flaw” in an update for Microsoft Windows users that caused the outage.

Companies said their payroll software was also affected, meaning workers who are paid weekly could also be affected by the outage.

Melanie Pizzi, CEO and founder of the Global Payroll Association, said: “We’ve already been contacted today by a number of customers who say that the Microsoft outage has meant they can no longer access their payroll software, or that they have been asked to log out immediately.”

“Depending on the length of this disruption, it could have a very serious impact on businesses across the country, particularly those that run payroll on a weekly basis.

“Furthermore, there may be delays in processing payroll at the end of next month, which could result in delays in employees receiving their monthly salaries.

“In the best case scenario, payroll staff would have to work overtime to resolve the issue, but fortunately, this does not appear to be a cyber attack.”

Some banking services have also been affected, with Barclays reporting disruptions to its digital investment platform.

A bank spokesman said: “All Barclays services are currently operating as normal with the exception of our digital investment platform, Smart Investor, where customers cannot currently manage their accounts via the app, online banking or over the phone.”

Other payment services, banks and financial institutions sought to assure customers that their systems were running uninterrupted.

Link, which runs Britain’s network of ATM cash machines, said its network was “functioning normally but we were increasing monitoring as a precautionary measure”.

CrowdStrike CEO and President George Kurtz appeared on the US Today Show.

He apologized to those affected by the bug (his initial statement, posted to X/Twitter and reproduced below, did not include an apology).

“We are deeply sorry for the impact this has had on our customers, on our travelers and on all those affected by this,” he said at the start of the interview.

He clarifies that no cyber attack was taking place and that it was in fact an error.

Customers are now rebooting their systems and they are starting to get up and running, he said, and the company is working with people whose systems did not automatically recover.

“We won’t give up until we get all our customers back,” he said.

“It’s been a long night,” he said, clearing his throat when asked why he didn’t add more staff to prevent a single bug from causing such damage.

The NHS says it has received calls from donors worried about whether they will be able to donate as usual. The NHS is trying to reassure donors to attend and book their usual blood drive, and to remind them that there is still an urgent need for people with type O blood in the UK.

“NHS Blood and Transplant is urging donors to make and keep to their appointments to donate blood to help make the NHS more resilient at this time,” an NHS Blood and Transplant spokesman said. “|O negative blood is particularly urgently needed.

“The blood donation system is unaffected and there are currently many booked appointments at blood donation centres in major towns and cities including London, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham. Blood is needed 24/7, so we urgently need people to fill appointments over the coming days, weeks and months.”

Until this week, CrowdStrike was primarily known for solving problems, or maybe for the fact that it sponsors the “halo” that protects Lewis Hamilton when his F1 car crashes.

This incident will forever be associated with “the biggest IT outage in history.”

“This will be the biggest IT disaster in history,” said cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt, adding that it’s “not too early to tell.”

“This is basically what we all worried about during Y2K, but this time it actually happened,” he wrote.

(This is a reference to the Year 2000 problem, which you can read about here. Everyone was worried about it, but very few people actually experienced any problems. It has since become an example of something that was widely feared but never actually happened, but security experts point out that this was because people tried so hard to avoid it, not because there wasn’t a problem.)