Air travellers in the United States faced delays while some airlines halted flight operations as Microsoft-based computers stopped working globally on Friday.
An outage of some of Microsoft’s cloud services caused unprecedented disruptions at many US airports on Friday morning (local time), with over 1,100 flights being cancelled and over 1,700 delayed.
These disruptions caused a lot of inconvenience to people traveling to and from various airports across the US, with many of them expressing their disappointment over the unexpected delays and cancellations of flights.
“Nobody knows anything here, the gate agent said we all know as much as they do,” a United Airlines passenger told ANI, adding that his flight from Milwaukee to Washington was delayed for hours first at the gate and then at the terminal.
Another passenger, Mac, said: “I’m on my way home…I didn’t know the internet was down. It’s a global disruption.”
A passenger named Jian said, “I didn’t receive any information from the airline I’m flying with. I just saw a news story on my phone… I’m tired, I want to go home.”
CrowdStrike – an American cybersecurity technology firm that provides cloud workload protection, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services – said the outage, which caused chaos for many, was not a ‘cyberattack’. Instead, there was an issue with the software and a fix had been deployed.
Several US airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, grounded all flights early Friday morning due to communications problems, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The FAA asked air traffic controllers to tell pilots on board that airlines are currently experiencing communications issues. As of 8:05 a.m. ET (Eastern Time), more than 1,100 flights had been canceled and more than 1,700 delayed, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
“A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including United’s,” United Airlines said in a statement Friday morning. “While we work to restore those systems, we are grounding all aircraft at their departure airports. Aircraft that have already taken off are proceeding to their destinations.”
American Airlines said in a statement, “We are aware of a technical issue with CrowdStrike that is impacting a number of airlines. American is working closely with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience to our customers.”
Industries ranging from banks to media companies were also affected by this disruption.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said in a statement released on social media on Friday morning.
After multiple businesses across the globe reported information technology disruptions on Friday, including the ‘Windows Blue Screen of Death’, security firm CrowdStrike, which is behind the software update that caused the outage, said earlier in the day that the problem has been isolated and resolved.
CrowdStrike President and CEO George Kurtz said the cybersecurity company is working with customers on the issues they’re experiencing, while also assuring that the problem is “not a security incident or a cyberattack.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also reacted to the disruption and said that Microsoft is working closely with CrowdStrike to provide technical guidance and support to customers.
“Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began affecting IT systems globally. We are aware of the issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and the entire industry to provide technical guidance and support to customers to get their systems back online safely,” Nadella wrote on X.
The disruption on Friday affected companies across a wide range of sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains and brokerage houses to news organisations and railway networks. The travel industry was hit particularly hard, with flights across the world being severely delayed.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
