Planes slowly began flying again on Saturday after one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years caused turmoil for global airlines, banks and the media, triggered by an update to an antivirus program.
Passengers crowded airports on Friday as an update to a program that runs on Microsoft Windows caused systems to crash worldwide, forcing the cancellation of dozens of flights.
By Saturday, officials said the situation at airports in Germany and France had almost returned to normal, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games starting on Friday.
Several U.S. airlines and airports in Asia said they had resumed operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and services at India, Indonesia and Singapore’s Changi Airport were almost back to normal by Saturday afternoon.
CrowdStrike apologizes
Microsoft on Saturday estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected in the global IT crash, saying the number represents less than one percent of all Windows machines.
“Although the percentage was small, the widespread economic and societal impacts reflect CrowdStrike’s use by enterprises running many critical services,” the report said.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.
In a blog post on Saturday, CrowdStrike said it had released an update on Thursday night that caused systems to crash and result in the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” fatal error message.
CrowdStrike said it had resolved the issue, and the company’s chief George Kurtz told US news channel CNBC that he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group and every individual that has been impacted by this.”
The company also said that it may take a few days for the situation to become completely normal.
Reports from the Netherlands and Britain suggested the disruption may have affected health services, meaning the full impact is not yet known.
Media companies were also affected, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had halted its Friday morning newscast, and Australia’s ABC reporting similar difficulties.
Authorities in Australia, Britain and Germany have warned that the disruption would be followed by a rise in fraud and phishing attempts, including offering help to restart computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported problems with their digital services, while some mobile phone service providers suffered disruptions and customer service at a number of companies collapsed.
“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junaid Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident of a similar scale was in 2017.
Flight chaos
While all flights were halted at some airports, airline staff at others resorted to manual check-in for passengers, leading to long queues and frustrated passengers.
Thousands of U.S. flights were cancelled, although airlines later said they were resuming service and trying to clear backlogs.
A senior US administration official said on Friday that “our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion still persists”.
India’s largest airline IndiGo on Saturday said the operational issue has been resolved, and in a statement on X said the process of restoring normal operations will continue over the weekend.
Low-cost airline AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online and was “working around the clock to restore its departure control system.”
Chinese state media said Beijing’s airports were not affected.
common cause
Companies scrambled to repair their systems and assess the damage, while officials sought to calm fears by ruling out any foul play.
The issue was “not the result of or related to a cyberattack,” according to CrowdStrike’s Saturday blog.
Although CrowdStrike introduced a fix, many experts questioned the ease of such a process.
“Although experienced users could implement this solution, it is impractical to expect millions of people to do so,” said Professor Ollie Buckley of Loughborough University in Britain.
Other experts said the incident should prompt a broader reconsideration of how much society depends on a handful of technology companies.
“We need to be aware that such software can become a common cause for the failure of multiple systems at the same time,” said Professor John McDiarmid of the University of York in Britain.
He said infrastructure must be made “resilient to such common problems”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
