Major airlines, medical facilities, businesses and police forces around the world were hit by a massive information technology glitch Friday, with Microsoft computers around the world showing "Blue Screens of Death."
The cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said Friday that the outages were the result of a routine software update gone wrong, "not a security incident or cyberattack."
CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity services and software for many large corporations that use Microsoft systems, later issued a new software update that automatically fixed some computers. But others must be manually restarted and patched, causing huge delays.
Microsoft announced late Friday morning that its 365 apps and services had recovered, and CrowdStrike said a fix had been deployed early in the morning. But some frozen computers couldn’t receive CrowdStrike’s automatic update, leading to some of the problems lingering into the weekend.
Many flights were delayed as of Friday afternoon. Starbucks locations in New York had resumed normal wait times, despite its mobile order-ahead feature still not working.
The glitch brought chaos to a number of key institutions and businesses around the world that may take some time to clear up.
Many flights were grounded across the globe, and stores and broadcasters in several countries went offline. According to the aviation technology company FlightAware, the tech glitch was responsible for more than half of the U.S.'s 1,352 flight delays and cancellations before 8 a.m. ET on Friday.
Major carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, all issued ground stops Friday morning citing communications issues. Passengers traveling to the United States from as far away as Japan had their flights canceled. Delta ordered a “global ground stop,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.
Follow live updates on the global tech outage
George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, said the problems could persist.
“It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover,” he told NBC’s “TODAY” show on Friday.
Kurtz said the company was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” adding the issue had been fixed on its end.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said. “We’re just trying to sort out where the negative interaction was,” he said of the faulty update that affected Windows PCs.
Earlier, in a post on X, Kurtz said that the outages were due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
In Europe, Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport said there would be delays to passenger check-ins “because of a technical fault,” and Aena, which manages 46 airports in Spain, said “an incident in the computer system” could cause delays. Several budget airlines in South Korea reported technical problems and delays, The Associated Press said. Sydney Airport, one of Australia’s largest, said there would be delays.
Paris' airport authority said in a statement that while its systems were not affected ahead of next week's Olympic Games opening ceremony, "this situation has an impact on the operations of airlines at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly airports: delays in check-in, delays and temporary suspension of some flights," according to the AP.
The Paris Olympics organizing committee told Reuters that while the outage was slowing its operations, its ticket sales remained unaffected. Elsewhere in the world of sports, British soccer team Manchester United delayed a ticket release scheduled for Friday, blaming problems with Microsoft.
That was just one of many businesses affected across the United Kingdom, with train operators blaming IT outages for cancellations Friday morning and the London Stock Exchange saying that a “3rd party global technical issue” had prevented its regulatory news service from posting any new items.
The country’s National Health Service posted on X that “the NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with a [general practitioner] appointment and patient record system.” The NHS that the system’s emergency phone service was still operating.
In Israel, at least 15 major hospitals were affected, according to media there. However, most medical centers had either returned to normal operations or reverted to manual operations. The emergency line of the country’s ambulance service was also affected.
At 2:20 a.m. ET, Alaska State Troopers said that 911 and nonemergency phone numbers across the state were not working “due to a nationwide technology-related outage."
The glitch affected news outlets, too, including NBC News. Sky News, NBC News' British partner broadcaster, was temporarily unable to air live news. Broadcasters in Australia also reported problems.
In a blog posted late Friday afternoon, Kurtz wrote that CrowdStrike staffers would be on call over the weekend to help affected customers, and warned of hackers and scammers exploiting the situation.
“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this," he said. "I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives."
