Computer systems at businesses and public services around the globe were disrupted after a botched update of a widely used cybersecurity program took down Microsoft Corp. systems.
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. chief executive George Kurtz posted Friday that the fault had been identified and “a fix has been deployed,” adding it wasn’t a cyberattack. Compounding the issue, Microsoft also reported an apparently unrelated problem with its Azure cloud service.
Several major U.S. airlines, including American Airlines, United and Delta, grounded flights early Friday due to the technical issue. Toronto-based Porter Airlines said it cancelled all flights until at least 10 a.m. MT.
American carriers’ morning departures to U.S. destinations from Calgary International Airport — including Houston, Denver and Minneapolis — were showing expected delays of 90 minutes to more than two hours.
Porter’s three morning flights from YYC to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal were cancelled.
“There has been minimal impact to operations at YYC as a result of the global IT outage. We are expecting some delays and cancellations for those airlines impacted by the outage,” YYC said in a statement.
“Our largest airline partners have not been impacted by the outage. Our operations teams are working diligently to support impacted airlines. Passengers should check the status of their flights with their airline before leaving for the airport.”
A United Airlines flight scheduled to arrive in Calgary from Washington, D.C., at noon was also cancelled.
The City of Calgary says the outage is impacting 311 lines.
Hitting airlines, banks and healthcare systems, there have been few outages of this scale. The cascading failures underscore vulnerabilities of the modern economy and the central role of security software, which has deep access to operating systems.
“This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”
The scale of the disruption reflects the enduring ubiquity of Microsoft’s Windows, and the sizeable adoption of CrowdStrike’s security software. Windows is installed on more than 70 per cent of machines, according to StatCounter, and CrowdStrike is the global leader in modern corporate protection software.
Although its software is designed to thwart threats, CrowdStrike customers posted blue error screens to social media as they were prevented from accessing laptops and corporate computers.
McDonald’s Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc., and the LSE Group were among the major companies to disclose issues from communications to customer service. Airports from Singapore to Zurich were impacted.
Bankers from Hong Kong and Dubai to South Africa and London were caught up in the outage, leaving some unable to log on to computer systems and hobbling others from making trades.
Microsoft said it was “aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform.” The company said it fixed a separate glitch affecting Microsoft 365 apps.
The outages weighed on several sectors, including airlines, insurers and stock exchange operators.
Past disruptions have been less severe. In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service affected the operation of tens of thousands of websites. In 2021, issues at content delivery network Fastly took out several media networks including Bloomberg News and there were separate disruptions at Amazon’s AWS cloud service.
“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and creator of the hack-checking website Have I Been Pwned, said in a post on social media platform X.
The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday and were blamed on the failure of Microsoft services Azure and 365, the company’s internet-based office software suite.
Problems linked to CrowdStrike then surfaced hours later in Asia and rippled across systems in Europe.