Major IT outage hits businesses worldwide, sparking chaos

Airline services, stock markets, banking, payment gateways, and media operations worldwide were hit in one of the biggest system outages after a glitch in a threat-detection software caused computers to crash.

Microsoft Windows-powered computers and tablets from the US and Europe to India, China and Australia crashed, with social media buzzing about forced restarts happening throughout the day

An update from cybersecurity-software firm CrowdStrike appeared to cause the outage for millions of Windows users worldwide.

The users of affected devices cited an error message related to CrowdStrike, and also a workaround aimed at deleting a CrowdStrike file.

Shares of CrowdStrike were down nearly 14% in premarket trading, while those of Microsoft were down 2.4%.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft 365 Status said on X early Friday.

Microsoft said a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”

Microsoft declared its Azure and Microsoft 365 issues resolved at 1am New York time on Friday, but that appeared to be applicable only to the US as complaints from other nations started pouring in.

Microsoft made the CrowdStrike link explicit on its Azure status page.

“We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state. We are aware of this issue and are currently investigating potential options Azure customers can take for mitigation,” it said.

The disruptions began on Thursday night in the US when Frontier Airlines grounded flights for two hours, which interrupted operations for other airlines.

Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Airlines also had all flights grounded on Friday.

The outage also affected the check-in systems used by Indian airlines, leading to longer queues at airports.

Airlines urged passengers not to make multiple bookings for a journey and not to contact call centers, which were already inundated with calls.

Many airlines were conducting manual check-ins and even issuing hand-written boarding passes.

“Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable. Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters,” Akasa Air posted on X.

“We are currently experiencing technical challenges with our service provider, affecting online services including booking, check-in, and manage booking functionalities. As a result, we have activated manual check-in and boarding processes across airports. We kindly request passengers with upcoming travel plans to arrive at the airport earlier than usual to complete check-in at our counters,” SpiceJet said on X.

“Due to the global IT issue, some of the services at the Delhi Airport were temporarily impacted. We are closely working with all our stakeholders to minimize the inconvenience to our flyers,” Delhi Airport posted on X.

The London Stock Exchange’s news service, RNS, which publishes market-moving company announcements, was down. A banner on the LSE website blamed a “3rd party global technical issue” but said other services operated normally.

Sky News, a UK news channel, was unable to broadcast, company chairman David Rhodes said in a post on X.

Port operators in Europe, meanwhile, were assessing the fallout on shipping, with Europe’s largest, the Port of Rotterdam, announcing that it expects some of the 3,000 firms based at the complex will be affected.