Global Tech Outage Causes Disruptions For Flights And Finance

A worldwide tech outage occurred on Friday morning, causing major disruptions in travel and the finance industry.

The outage stemmed from a software update from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The software update grounded many flights and left millions of banking customers without access to trading and other banking services.

CEO of CrowdStrike George Kurtz shared, “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company.”

BREAKING: Global tech outage hits companies around the world.

Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.

Cyber security engineers pointed to a problem with Crowdstrike,… pic.twitter.com/pe5v7Fw6gq

— The General (@GeneralMCNews) July 19, 2024

watch the skies clear out over the united states after the global tech outage: pic.twitter.com/NXWL7Jm7iV

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 19, 2024

Here’s what Reuters reported:

A worldwide tech outage crippled industries from travel to finance on Friday before services started coming back online after hours of disruption, highlighting the risks of a global shift towards digital, interconnected technologies.

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A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike (CRWD.O), opens new tab appeared to have triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced some broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s (MSFT.O), opens new tab customers and that a fix was being deployed.

Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been fixed.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz told NBC News’ “Today” programme.

🚨BREAKING:
A global tech outage is impacting news networks/stations, grounding airline flights, and halting banks and businesses right now. All of us are experiencing major technical issues. We’re working to learn more now — pic.twitter.com/vw6fxSk0Qv

— Carmen Blackwell (@Carmen_OnTv) July 19, 2024

Per CNN:

The global cyber outage that caused disruptions to airlines, businesses and emergency services on Friday could be the “largest IT outage in history,” according to cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt.

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Hunt said in a post on X on Friday.

“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” he added.
Other recent large outages:

It remains to be seen whether the scale and impact of the outage will reach the level of the “NotPetya” cyberattack in 2017, which the Kremlin was widely considered to have been behind. The 2017 attack initially targeted computers in Ukraine but affected companies globally. The White House upbraided Russia for “the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history.”

There was another mass internet outage in 2021 across the world, following a bad software update by Fastly, a company which runs a content delivery network of servers and data centers.

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In January 2023, a computer outage at the US Federal Aviation Administration caused thousands of canceled or delayed flights but did not directly affect other sectors. The FAA said at the time that they had traced the fault “to a damaged database file” and that there was “no evidence of a cyberattack.”

A Delta passenger at MSY tells me that every Delta flight is delayed 2 hours this morning due to the worldwide tech outage.

Everyone has to physically check-in at the kiosk.

Attendants are not guaranteeing that any flights will go out this morning.@FOX8NOLA pic.twitter.com/n6gBmLITAj

— Andrés Fuentes (@news_fuentes) July 19, 2024