Major airlines, media organizations, businesses and police forces around the world are currently being affected by a massive information technology glitch caused by a problem with Microsoft cloud computing services early Friday.
Flights have been grounded in several countries and stores and broadcasters in several countries went offline as the outage affected Windows PCs.
Major carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, all issued ground stops Friday morning citing communications issues. Delta has ordered a “global ground stop,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.
Alaska State Troopers said in an update on Facebook just before 2:20 a.m. (ET) that 911 and non-emergency phone numbers across the state were not working “due to a nationwide technology-related outage.”
In Europe, Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport said there would be delays to passenger check-ins “because of a technical fault,” and Aena, which manages 46 airports in Spain, said “an incident in the computer system” could cause delays. Sydney Airport, one of Australia’s largest, said there would be delays.
Paris’ airport authority said in a statement that while its systems were not affected ahead of next week’s Olympic Games opening ceremony, “this situation has an impact on the operations of airlines at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly airports: delays in check-in, delays and temporary suspension of some flights,” according to The Associated Press.
Train operators in the United Kingdom also blamed IT outages for cancellations Friday morning and the London Stock Exchange blamed a “3rd party global technical issue” for stopping its regulatory news service posting any new items.
The country’s National Health Service posted on X that “the NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with a [general practitioner] appointment and patient record system.” The statement added that the health system’s emergency phone service was still operating. Some British pharmacies are also affected.
In Israel, too, at least 15 major hospitals have been affected, according to local media. However, most medical centers have now either returned to normal operations or reverted to manual operations. The emergency line of the country’s ambulance service is also affected.
Users reported seeing a blue screen when attempting to start their computers. The glitch appears to have caused havoc for supermarket self-service checkouts and countless websites.
Microsoft said the problem with its Azure Service and Microsoft 365 apps, including services such as the videoconferencing app Teams, was fixed early Friday, but companies across the U.S. and Europe were still reporting problems. The company said “a small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact.”
An update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to the outages, the company told NBC.
In a post on X, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that the outages were due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” He added that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack” and that “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
The glitch has affected news outlets, including NBC News. Sky News, NBC News’ British partner broadcaster, was temporarily unable to air live news.
“Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption. Much of our news report is still available online, and we are working hard to restore all services,” Sky News Executive Chairman David Rhodes said on X.
Broadcasters in Australia also reported problems. The country’s national cyber security coordinator, Michelle McGuinness, said on X that the issue did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
