Global technology outage disrupts major airlines, 911 services and businesses

A major cyber outage has grounded flights and disrupted businesses and media organizations throughout the world.

The technology glitch caused chaos on Friday morning with Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines issuing statements saying that their flight operations had been impacted. Emergency response systems were down at police agencies and healthcare providers in Phoenix, Arizona, forcing some police and ambulance providers to dispatch cars manually, per The Arizona Republic.

Banks and financial services firms from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
CRWD	CROWDSTRIKE HOLDINGS INC.	346.80	+0.83	+0.24%
MSFT	MICROSOFT CORP.	430.98	+7.52	+1.78%
DAL	DELTA AIR LINES INC.	63.41	-0.41	-0.64%
AAL	AMERICAN AIRLINES GROUP INC.	14.61	+0.09	+0.62%

In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports from medical officials on X said, while Sky News, one of the country's major news broadcasters was off air, apologizing for being unable to transmit live, and soccer club Manchester United said on X that it had to postpone a scheduled release of tickets.

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England's National Health Service said Friday it was aware of the global IT outage and that its EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, had been disrupted at a majority of general practitioner's offices. 

"The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP," the NHS said. 

"There are also some issues with administrative systems in hospitals that mean staff are having to work manually from paper to manage certain tasks but in the majority of hospitals, care is continuing as normal." 

The technology glitch was caused by a faulty update from CrowdStrike, a U.S. cybersecurity technology company based in Texas, in a single content update for Windows hosts.

It resulted in Windows computers and tablets crashing and displaying a blue screen, known informally as the "Blue Screen of Death." Over half of Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike software, the firm said in a promotional video this year.

"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," George Kurtz, the president and CEO of CrowdStrike posted on X. "We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website."

"Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack."

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. shares plummeted 9% Friday, resulting in the stock's worst weekly performance since November 2022. 

President Biden was briefed on the global outage on Friday and his administration is communicating with CrowdStrike and impacted entities, according to a White House official. 

"His team is engaged across the interagency to get sector by sector updates throughout the day and is standing by to provide assistance as needed," the official said. 

Delta Air Lines issued a statement early Friday morning announcing that all flights were paused as they worked through the technology issue. Allegiant Air grounded flights also.

United Airlines' ground stop has been lifted for all airports, an Air Traffic Control System Command Center advisory said. 

United earlier said it would resume some flights, but customers can expect schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday. The airline has issued a waiver to make it easier for customers to change their travel plans via United.com or the United app, a spokesperson said. 

American Airlines says it has been able to "safely re-establish our operation."

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The FAA said all flights, regardless of destination, have been affected.  More than 30,000 flights have been delayed as of 12:42 p.m. ET Friday with 5.944 delays within, into or out of the United States, according to data from flightaware.com. 

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigigeg told CNBC on Friday that any transportation delays should be "resembling normal" by Saturday. 

"The issue has been identified. It’s really a matter of the kind of ripple or cascade effects as they get everything in their networks back to normal," Buttigieg said. "These flights, they run so tightly, so back-to-back that even after a root cause is addressed, you can still be feeling those impacts throughout the day."

Airports in Singapore, Hong Kong and India said the outage meant some airlines were having to check in passengers manually.

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, one of Europe's busiest, said it was affected, while airline Iberia said it had been operating manually at airports until its electronic check-in counters and online check-ins were reactivated. It said there had been some delays but no flight cancelations.

London Gatwick was also experiencing issues, while Air France-KLM said its operations were also disrupted.

Amazon's cloud computing service warned customers to look out for "connectivity issues and reboots" as a result of the CrowdStrike outage. 

AWS services and network connectivity "continue to operate normally," but some "Windows Instances, Windows Workspaces and Appstream Applications" that use CrowdStrike had issues Friday morning, according to a notice on AWS' service dashboard. The company gave customers instructions to restore connectivity. 

Shipping services FedEx and UPS also reported disruptions Friday, warning that packages might be delayed while both companies separately work to mitigate the impact of CrowdStrike's outage. 

The technology error was separate from a problem Microsoft faced overnight with cloud services, including Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams video conferencing. 

Microsoft said via X they were "working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion" and that they were "observing a positive trend in service availability."

Microsoft says service went down for some customers in the central United States around 6 p.m. ET, "including failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services." 

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They also stated on their services health status page and X that they are "continuing to see an improvement in service availability across multiple Microsoft 365 apps and services. We're closely monitoring our telemetry data to ensure this upward trend continues as our mitigation actions continue to progress."

Officials have not said how long it will take to resolve the stop, but an update is expected later Friday morning.

Reuters contributed to this report.