A major outage wreaked havoc on global computer systems on Friday, grounding flights in the United States, derailing television broadcasts in the UK, and impacting telecommunications in Australia.
In the United States, major air carriers, including Delta, United, and American Airlines, grounded all flights on Friday due to a communication issue, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Flights were also suspended at Berlin Brandenburg Airport in Germany because of a “technical problem,” a spokeswoman told AFP. “There are delays to check-in, and flight operations had to be cancelled until 10:00 am (0800 GMT),” she said, adding that she could not say when they would resume.
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Spain’s airport operator Aena reported “disruptions” at all airports in the country due to an IT outage that affected several companies worldwide on Friday. Hong Kong’s airport authority issued a statement linking some airline disruptions to a Microsoft outage.
The UK’s largest rail operator warned of potential train cancellations due to IT issues, while photos posted online showed large queues forming at Sydney Airport in Australia. “Flights are currently arriving and departing; however, there may be some delays throughout the evening,” a Sydney Airport spokesman said. “We have activated our contingency plans with our airline partners and deployed additional staff to our terminals to assist passengers.”
Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator stated that the “large-scale technical outage” was caused by an issue with a “third-party software platform,” adding that there was no indication of hacker involvement.
Sky News in the UK reported that the glitch had halted its morning news broadcasts, while Australian broadcaster ABC also experienced a major “outage.” Some self-checkout terminals at one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains displayed blue error messages.
New Zealand media reported issues with banks and computer systems within the country’s parliament. Australian telecommunications firm Telstra suggested the outages were due to “global issues” with software provided by Microsoft and cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
Microsoft stated it was taking “mitigation actions” in response to service issues, though it was unclear if these were linked to the global outages. “Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,” Microsoft said in a post on social media platform X. CrowdStrike could not be immediately reached for comment.
University of Melbourne expert Toby Murray indicated that the problem might be related to a security tool called CrowdStrike Falcon. “CrowdStrike is a global cyber security and threat intelligence company,” Murray explained. “Falcon is an endpoint detection and response platform, that monitors computers for intrusions and responds to them.”
University of South Australia cybersecurity researcher Jill Slay predicted that the global impact of the outages would be “enormous.”
