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Businesses around the world are affected by the Microsoft shutdown
One of the biggest IT outages in history has hit businesses around the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, after what was supposed to be a routine software update turned into a crisis.
Thousands of flights were canceled on Friday, workers in cities from Tokyo to London were unable to log into their computers, hospital operations were delayed and some television channels went off the air.
The outage was attributed to a security update from the US group Crowd strikethat caused a problem in Microsoft’s Windows. PCs and servers are affected, suggesting that millions of computers may need to be fixed for the problem to be resolved.
More than 12 hours after the problems began, some services, including airlines and media groups, began to come back online. But the unprecedented scale of the outage means it could take days for every Windows user to recover.
“I don’t think it’s too early to say: This is going to be the biggest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt, a prominent security consultant, said in a social media post. “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it actually happened this time.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media: “Biggest IT failure ever,” followed by “Microsoft” next to an angry face emoji.
In an online advisoryCrowdStrike told customers they would need to reboot all affected computers, delete the problematic update file, and reboot again. Allie Mellen, an analyst at IT research group Forrester, said: “Fixing this issue requires hands-on, keyboard-based work — in some cases, for hundreds or thousands of affected machines.”
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” trended on microblogging site Weibo, with users posting photos of blue screen errors.
Australian businesses were among the first to warn of the problems, with operations at retailers including Woolworths and 7-Eleven hit. Sydney Airport said a “global technical outage” had affected its operations.
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In Europe, airlines and airports warned of disruption on what was expected to be the busiest day for UK departures since October 2019.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said Delta, United and American Airlines had suspended flights due to the grounding. The three largest U.S. carriers later resumed flights, but nearly 8,000 U.S. flights were delayed or canceled, according to aviation data provider FlightAware.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the core infrastructure of the world’s internet,” said Ciaran Martin, a professor at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the National Cyber Security Centre.
In an online post on Friday, Microsoft CrowdStrike Inc. said it was aware of “an issue” affecting Windows devices running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent that could “get stuck in a reboot state.” This appears to have contributed to the issues hitting some of its cloud computing customers.
CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest providers of endpoint security software, which is used by businesses to monitor security issues across a wide range of devices, from desktop PCs to payment terminals.
CrowdStrike shares fell 9% and Microsoft shares fell 0.5% in early afternoon trading in New York.
CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurtz said 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 cyberattack,” Kurtz said. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Microsoft said: “Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for taking down multiple IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”
However, the incident is far from resolved, with several industries reporting ongoing issues on Friday:
Financial services
Global banks, brokerages and financial technology companies including JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Bloomberg were affected, leaving some traders unable to access their systems to process trades.
JPMorgan’s trade execution systems were affected, while UBS and fintech firm ION Group also faced issues on Friday morning, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some Bloomberg Terminal users also faced issues and outages ahead of the UK market opening on Friday. Broker CMC Markets said it was experiencing issues “currently impacting access to our trading platforms”.
“It’s a mess,” said a senior trader at an asset manager. “This is the biggest turnaround in years.”
The London Stock Exchange Group said trading was proceeding normally at its venue but its news service was unavailable in the morning before being restored later.
Transport
Airline passengers faced the prospect of prolonged disruption as carriers began the painstaking process of restoring flight schedules following the grounding.
Flight cancellations mounted throughout the day, with some of the worst disruptions in the U.S. United said the problem affected several systems, including those for calculating aircraft weight, checking in customers and call center phones.
More than 5,100 flights had been canceled as of Friday afternoon in New York, more than 4% of all scheduled flights, according to data provider Cirium.
The disruption came at one of the busiest travel periods of the year, leaving airlines with little room to recover operations quickly and with planes and crews stranded out of position.
Airports from the US to the UK, India and Australia reported problems on Friday, with Dutch carrier KLM temporarily suspending operations after finding it was “unable to handle flights”.
Other airlines, including British Airways and Ryanair, continued operating but warned customers of delays.
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“Not all airports and airlines are CrowdStrike customers, so not all are affected equally,” said Christiaan Hen, chief executive of aviation technology company Assaia.
“However, [given] the highly connected nature of the industry, even if not directly affected, most airports and airlines are affected in some way.”
Media, consumer and sport
Sky News was forced to suspend programming on Friday morning but has since resumed broadcasting. David Rhodes, Sky News’ chief executive, said on X that the UK broadcaster was “unable to deliver live TV this morning”.
Manchester United were one of many football clubs in England and Scotland to be forced to delay the release of tickets for their matches, blaming a “global outage of Microsoft servers which is affecting many systems, including ours”.
Paris Olympics organisers said the outage had affected their IT activities, just a week before the city is due to welcome millions of visitors.
Health
Most doctors’ practices in the UK have been affected by an issue with EMIS, a patient booking and registration system, forcing practices to use non-digital methods of communicating with patients and delivering services. The ability of UK pharmacies to dispense vital medicines has been affected.
In Germany, the Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital, one of the largest in Europe, was forced to cancel all elective operations and close its clinics without appointments.
The largest hospital network in the US state of Massachusetts, Mass General Brigham, has canceled all surgical procedures and non-urgent medical appointments.
Reporting by Daniel Thomas, Philip Georgiadis, Stephanie Stacey, Akila Quinio, Robert Wright, Sarah Neville and Nikou Asgari in London, Cheng Leng and William Langley in Hong Kong, Oliver Barnes in New York, Claire Bushey in Chicago
*This story has been changed to correct a quote from a Forrester analyst to clarify that hundreds or thousands of machines would need updates, not hundreds of thousands