New York Daily News
(TNS)
A sweeping technology outage, seemingly triggered by issues involving widely used Microsoft systems, grounded flights, disrupted businesses worldwide and knocked banks offline on Friday.
Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm that lists Microsoft among its clients, said an update to its Falcon Sensor software, a system that offers “real-time threat protection,” is at the heart of the issue.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” CEO George Kurtz said in a statement on X.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he continued. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Microsoft also acknowledged the outage, telling users Friday that “the underlying cause has been fixed, however, residual impact is continuing to affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services.”
It added: “We’re conducting additional mitigations to provide relief.”
The White House said President Joe Biden has been briefed on the matter, and that the administration is “standing by to provide assistance as needed.”
The turmoil began for many late Thursday night — with Microsoft users around the world hit with error screens — and persisted into Friday morning. A big screen outside Macy’s at Herald Square in New York featured the so-called “blue screen of death” and a “Recovery” message, though most services in the city are operating as usual, albeit with some adjustments.
“FDNY IT and Communication teams implemented our redundancy procedures upon notification of the CrowdStrike outage,” the FDNY’s chief spokesman Jim Long said in a statement.
“Dispatchers and Field Units communicated over the department radios limiting any operational impact,” he continued. “Updates to follow as we work through this event.”
Police officers and other first responders have similarly relied on radio as their department issued phones and many desktop computer functions have been rendered unusable by the outage.
A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams’ office posted on social media, saying, they are aware of “the global technical outage involving CrowdStrike and are currently assessing the full impact it may have on city operations.” Emergency operations, including the 911 call system, have not been impacted.
The same could not be said for elsewhere in the United States — Alaska State Troopers warned that many 911 and non-emergency call centers were not operating, while the City of Fairfax Police Department, in Virginia, said it was experiencing technical issue. New Hampshire and parts of Texas also struggled with emergency services and calls, though they have since been restored.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority noted that buses, subways, the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North trains are running normally, though “some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline.”
Those traveling by air however, many of them gearing up for summer vacations, have been significantly less lucky.
Major U.S. carriers including Delta, United and American Airlines grounded flights Friday morning due to communication issues, triggered by the widespread outage. And without access to check-in and booking services, long lines have formed, snaking their way through airports in Europe and Asia as well as the United States.
As of Friday morning, more than 600 flights into, out of or within the United States had been canceled, according to FlightAware.com. That includes more than 100 flights across the three major airports in the New York City area. JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty in New Jersey have also seen more than 300 flights delayed, according to flight tracking data.
“The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines,” the FAA posted on social media. “Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved.”
Some travelers trapped at airports shared videos online of the chaos while others snapped photos of the blue error screens taking over giant displays in airports.
Outside the travel sector, banks and financial companies around the world have experienced issues, including the London Stock Exchange, which reported problems with its data and news platform.
German finance giant Allianz said it too was “experiencing a major outage that is impacting employees ability to log into their computers.”
Hospitals and medical facilities, left unable to access patient and appointment information, have similarly been bogged down by the outage. In Great Britain, the Royal Surrey hospital declared a “critical incident” and had to temporarily suspend radiography treatment. The National Health Service in England, meanwhile, said it was experiencing disruptions in the majority of doctors’ offices. Non-emergency operations were also suspended at German hospitals due to the snafu.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Harris Health Quentin Mease Health Center in Houston similarly canceled all elective procedures and outpatient care, while Mass General Brigham in Boston has canceled “all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits are cancelled today.”
According to Down Detector, there are also numerous outages across platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Azure, Instagram, eBay, Visa, and AT&T. Retailers too were disrupted, with payment processing struggles snarling business, though Microsoft and Visa said they were not affected by the tech chaos.”
According to its website, Crowdstrike, which launched in 2012, is widely used by businesses and government agencies and currently has the “world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise. The company, based in Austin, Texas, has a partnership with Amazon Web Services and its Falcon for Defender is designed to supplement Microsoft Defender to prevent attacks.
With News Wire Services
©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
