The fallout from the service interruption is being felt worldwide in airports and by businesses using Microsoft 365.
An apparent worldwide interruption of service for Microsoft users led to cancellations and delays of flights at Montreal’s Trudeau airport on Friday morning.
The cause of the service interruption has yet to be established, but its fallout is being felt worldwide in airports and by businesses using the Microsoft 365 system.
Computer systems around the globe failed after a botched update of a widely used cybersecurity program took down Microsoft Corp. systems.
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. chief executive officer George Kurtz posted on X on Friday that the fault had been identified and “a fix has been deployed,” adding that it wasn’t a cyberattack. Compounding the issue, Microsoft reported an apparently unrelated problem with its Azure cloud service.
There have been few outages of this scale in the past few years. CrowdStrike customers posted blue error screens to social media as they were prevented from accessing laptops and corporate computers. The cascading failures underscored how a growing proportion of businesses have moved services and support processes online in recent years, seeking to cut costs or better unify global operations.
“This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”
This story will be updated.