Global IT systems crash after CrowdStrike update hits Microsoft

Thousands of businesses around the world were thrown into disarray on Friday after a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to Microsoft-run system crashes at airlines, banks, hospitals, media outlets and retailers.

After hours of confusion, CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said customers had been "impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts".

"We're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies."

"Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

CrowdStrike shares were down 11% on the Nasdaq market in the US, wiping billions off its value.

However, reports suggested that each affected terminals would have to be restarted individually in "safe mode" for the fix to be installed - a laborious process. Problems started on Thursday when Microsoft said it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the Central US region, which had caused the grounding and cancellation of several flights.

By Friday the problems had spread to airports globally, with a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365 cited as the cause.

Almost 1,500 flights had been cancelled worldwide by 1500 BST. In the US, United, Delta and American Airlines temporarily ground their flights.

Dutch carrier KLM said flight handling was “impossible” and it would suspend most operations, while Swiss air traffic had to cut flights by 30%. Problems were also reported in India, Japan and Australia.

There was chaos at UK airports on what was meant to be the busiest day for travel since pre-Covid pandemic 2019 with more than 3,200 departures from the UK scheduled for Friday. Passengers were left stranded at check-in for hours amid sweltering temperatures.

Britain's already creaking rail network, which struggles with hot weather at the best of times, also reported "widespread" issues across its network, with at least one operator, South Western Railway, saying all of its ticket vending machines had stopped working.

European airline Ryanair said it was experiencing "potential disruptions across the network" - which it says is due to a third- party outage, while Berlin airport said it was also having technical problems. along with Stansted in the UK and Amsterdam's Schipol.

Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports had started manually checking in passengers.

In Australia, the outage had hit state-owned broadcaster ABC along with the commercial channels 10 and Sky, while bank customers were unable to make payments online. The country's telecoms giant Telstra was also affected.

In the UK the RNS service was also down, preventing company news from being published via the London Stock Exchange. Broadcaster Sky News was also off the air.

Microsoft users reported the famous "blue screen of death" indicating their computers had crashed.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com