A global tech outage was disrupting operations in multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.
The travel industry was among the hardest hit with airports around the world, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin and several Spanish airports reporting problems with their systems and delays.
International airlines, including Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned of problems with their booking systems and other disruptions.
Zurich airport, the largest in Switzerland, that it had suspended all flight arrivals because of the outage.
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“Landings are currently no longer possible,” the airport said, though “flights already en route for Zurich are still authorised for landing”.
Out of over 110,000 scheduled commercial flights today, 1,390 have been cancelled globally so far and more are expected to be called off, according to data from global aviation analytics firm Cirium.
In Edinburgh, a Reuters witness said boarding pass scanners carried a “server offline message”, with the airport saying passengers shouldn’t travel to the airport without checking their flight status online first.
The aviation sector is hit particularly hard due to its sensitivity to timings.
Airlines rely on a closely coordinated schedule often run by air traffic control.
Just one delay of a few minutes can throw off a flight schedule for take-offs and landings for an airport and airline for the rest of the day.
Meanwhile, flights were gradually resuming at Berlin Brandenburg airport after being suspended for a time this morning.
“Departures are taking place,” the spokeswoman said, adding however that there “may be longer waiting times” as “everything now has to be gradually ramped up again”.
Airports across the UK, including Edinburgh and London Stansted, were unable to use automated boarding pass scanners with them resorting to manually checking them.
In the United States, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded flights citing communication problems this morning.
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The order came shortly after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers, though it was not immediately clear whether those were related.
“A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United. While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports,” United said in a statement.
“Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
Microsoft MSFT.O said users might be unable to access various Office 365 apps and services due to a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure-backed workloads”.
Hong Kong International Airport said a Microsoft outage was affecting several airlines and it had switched to manual check-in, but flight operations had not been affected. Singapore’s Changi airport also said check-ins were being handled manually.
Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike CRWD.Osaid it was working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts.
Impact of outages ripple far and wide
Australia’s government said this morning that the outages suffered by media, banks and telecoms companies there appeared to be linked to CrowdStrike.
According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.
The alert, which was sent at 6.30am Irish time, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
Critical infrastructure in Germany was affected by the global IT outage, an interior ministry spokesperson said.
The German government defines critical infrastructure to encompass areas such as energy, transport and telecommunications.
Two hospitals in the northern German cities of Lübeck and Kiel cancelled elective operations scheduled for today, their operator said.
Patient care and emergency services are being maintained, the University Clinic of Schleswig-Holstein added in a statement.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports from medical officials on X said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters was off air, apologising for being unable to transmit live.
Banks and other financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa warned clients about disruptions to their services, while the London Stock Exchange Group reported an outage of its data and news platform Workspace.
Amazon’s AWS cloud service provider said in a statement that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”
It was not immediately clear whether all reported outages were linked to CrowdStrike problems or there were other issues at play.
‘No evidence’ global IT outage is cyber attack – France
There is no evidence that a global IT outage affecting airlines, banks, media and other business was caused by a cyber attack, France’s cybersecurity agency said.
“The teams are fully mobilised to identify and support the affected entities in France and to understand… the origin of this outage,” the national cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) said, adding “There is no evidence to suggest that this outage is the result of a cyberattack.”
It comes as a UK government security source also said that the outages are not being treated as a malicious act.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said security experts were not treating it as a cyber-related security issue.
There was no information to suggest the outage was a cyber security incident, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.
Follow live: Global outage hits airports, broadcasters and services