The biggest IT outage in history has hit businesses around the world, from airlines to financial services to media groups, causing major disruption.
Thousands of workers in cities from Tokyo to London were unable to log into their computers on Friday, affecting businesses, transport, emergency services and other public services.
The outage was blamed on a security update from US company CrowdStrike causing problems for Microsoft Windows, affecting PCs and servers and potentially requiring millions of computers to be repaired to fix the problem.
“I don’t think it’s too early to say this will be the biggest IT disaster in history,” Troy Hunt, a prominent security consultant, said in a social media post. “This is basically what we all feared with Y2K, but now it’s happened.”
“The biggest tech fail of all time,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media, followed by “Microsoft” with an angry-face emoji.
In China, some workers who were told to go home by their employers welcomed an early start to the weekend. “Thank you Microsoft for the early holidays” briefly became the most searched phrase on the microblogging site Weibo on Friday afternoon, as users posted photos of blue error screens.
Australian businesses were the first to warn of the problem, with retailers including Woolworths and 7-Eleven suffering losses, and Sydney Airport said a “global technical outage” had affected airport operations.
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In Europe, airlines and airports warned of potential disruptions with what is expected to be the busiest day of flights departing from the UK since October 2019.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines had requested that flights scheduled to take off be grounded. According to aviation data provider FlightAware, the three major U.S. airlines have since resumed operations, but about 4,000 flights have been delayed or canceled.
“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 National Cyber Security Centre.
Microsoft said in an online post early Friday that it was aware of an “issue” where Windows devices running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent could become “stuck in a reboot state,” which appears to be contributing to problems experienced by some of the company’s cloud computing customers.
“We can confirm that the affected updates have been retracted by CrowdStrike,” Microsoft added.
CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest providers of “endpoint” security software that companies use to monitor for security issues across a range of devices, from desktop PCs to payment terminals at checkouts.
CrowdStrike shares fell 13% in early morning trading in New York, while Microsoft shares were down 0.8%.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Friday morning that the company was “working with customers affected by the flaw discovered in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
“This is not a security incident or cyber attack,” Kurtz said. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed.”
Just before midday UK time, Microsoft said it had “fixed the underlying cause” of the issue in its cloud services but that some software “continues to be affected by residual issues.”
But the incident is far from resolved, with ongoing problems reported in several departments on Friday.
Financial Services
The outage affected trading at banks and brokerages across Europe as traders scrambled to get deals done.
JPMorgan’s trade execution systems have been affected and trading group ION is facing problems, according to people familiar with the matter.
The London Stock Exchange Group said trading was not affected but that there were problems with its news services, with only a few news releases being published on Friday morning before services were resumed in the early afternoon.
Metrobank said an IT outage caused global disruption, hitting payments and customer service.
German insurer Allianz said some of its systems and phone lines were unavailable. Admiral, a major British car insurer, said it was “experiencing problems with phone lines affecting our ability to respond to customer enquiries.” Italy’s Generali also told the Financial Times it had been affected.
Transportation facilities
Airlines, airports and railways around the world struggled to keep operations running smoothly.
Flight cancellations continued throughout the day, with the worst occurring in the US, where United Airlines, Delta Airlines and American Airlines suspended flights early on Friday. United and American Airlines have since resumed service.
As of 6 a.m. ET, 512 flights departing from the US had been canceled, representing about 2% of all departures and “significantly higher than normal for this time of the day,” according to aviation data provider Cirium.
In Europe, Dutch airline KLM said the problems had made it “unable to handle flights” and the airline had grounded “most” of its operations.
Around 1,390 flights were cancelled worldwide, with the number rising by the hour, according to Cirium. British Airways, Ryanair and Heathrow Airport continued to operate but warned passengers of possible disruptions.
Media, Consumer and Sports
Sky News was forced to pull the show on Friday morning but later brought it back on air. Sky News chairman David Rose said on X that the British broadcaster “was not able to broadcast live this morning.”
Manchester United are one of many football clubs in England and Scotland that have been forced to postpone ticket sales for matches due to a “global Microsoft server outage affecting many systems, including our own.”
Organisers of the Paris Olympics said a global IT outage affected operations just a week before the city is due to welcome millions of tourists.
Health and Industry
The majority of GP practices in the UK have been affected by issues with EMIS, the booking and patient record system, forcing them to use non-digital ways to communicate with patients and provide services. The ability of UK pharmacies to dispense vital medicines has also been affected.
In Germany, the University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein, one of Europe’s largest teaching hospitals, was forced to cancel all elective surgeries and close its clinics to no appointments.