One of the biggest-ever IT outages has hit companies across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, causing significant disruption.
Thousands of workers in cities from Tokyo to London were unable to log on to their computers on Friday, affecting businesses and public services such as transportation and emergency services.
The outage has been blamed on a security update from US group CrowdStrike, which caused a problem with Microsoft’s Windows. PCs and servers are affected, suggesting that millions of computers may need to be fixed for the issue to be resolved.
“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” said Troy Hunt, a prominent security consultant, in a social media post. “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, wrote on social media: “Biggest IT fail ever” followed by “Microsoft” next to an angry emoji face.
In China, some workers welcomed an early start to the weekend after their employers told them to go home. “Thank you Microsoft for an early vacation” was briefly the most-searched term on microblogging site Weibo on Friday afternoon, with users posting pictures of blue error screens.
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Australian businesses were the first to warn of problems, with the operations of retailers including Woolworths and 7-Eleven hit. Sydney airport said “a global technical outage” had affected its operations.
In Europe, airlines and airports warned of disruption on what was set to be the busiest day for departures from the UK since October 2019.
The US Federal Aviation Administration said Delta, United and American Airlines had asked to ground flights due to take off. The three largest US carriers later resumed flying, but almost 4,000 flights were delayed or cancelled, according to aviation data provider FlightAware.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the National Cyber Security Centre.
In an online post earlier on Friday, Microsoft said it was aware of “an issue” affecting Windows devices running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may “get stuck in a restarting state”. That appears to have contributed to the problems that hit some of its cloud computing customers.
“We can confirm the affected update has been pulled by CrowdStrike,” Microsoft added.
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CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest providers of “endpoint” security software, used by companies to monitor for security problems across a huge range of devices, from desktop PCs to checkout payment terminals.
Shares in CrowdStrike fell 13 per cent and Microsoft fell 0.8 per cent in early trading in New York.
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said on Friday morning that the company was “working with customers impacted by a defect found 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.”
Microsoft said just before midday UK time that the “underlying cause has been fixed” in its cloud services, though “residual impact is continuing to affect” some software.
However, the incident is far from resolved, with multiple sectors reporting continued problems on Friday:
Financial services
Trading at banks and brokers across Europe was hit by the outage as traders scrambled to see whether they could finalise deals.
JPMorgan’s trading execution systems were affected, and trading group ION was facing problems, according to people familiar with the matter.
London Stock Exchange Group said trading had been unaffected but its news service faced problems, with only a handful of news releases being published on Friday morning until the service resumed in the early afternoon.
Metro Bank said its payments and customer services were hit by an IT outage causing global disruption.
German insurer Allianz said that some of its systems and phone lines were unavailable. The UK’s Admiral, a big motor insurer, said it had a “problem with our phone lines that’s affecting our ability to deal with customer queries”. Italy’s Generali told the Financial Times it had also been affected.
Transportation
Airlines, airports and train services across the world were scrambling to keep a grip on their operations.
Flight cancellations built throughout the day, with some of the worst problems in the US, where United, Delta and American airlines suspended flights early on Friday morning. United and American have since restarted operations.
As of 6am eastern time, there were 512 cancelled flights from the US, almost 2 per cent of total departures and “significantly higher than usual at this point in the day”, according to aviation data provider Cirium.
In Europe, Dutch carrier KLM said the problems “made it impossible to handle flights” and that the airline suspended “most” of its operations.
In all, about 1,390 flights had been cancelled globally, with the number growing every hour, Cirium said. British Airways, Ryanair and Heathrow continued operating, but warned customers of potential disruption.
Media, consumer and sports
Sky News was forced to suspend programming on Friday morning but has since resumed broadcasting. David Rhodes, executive chair of Sky News, said on X that the UK broadcaster had “not been able to broadcast live TV this morning”.
Manchester United was one of many football clubs in England and Scotland to be forced to delay the release of tickets to its matches, blaming a “global Microsoft Servers outage which is affecting many systems, including ours”.
The organisers of the Paris Olympic Games have said the global IT outage has hit their IT activities, just a week before the city is set to welcome millions of visitors.
Health and industry
The majority of GP practices in the UK have been affected by an issue with EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, forcing practices to use non-digital methods of communicating with patients and providing services. UK pharmacies’ ability to dispense vital medicines has been affected.
In Germany, Schleswig-Holstein university hospital, one of Europe’s largest, has been forced to cancel all elective surgeries and close its walk-in clinics. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
