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- A mass IT outage is affecting flights, banks, and supermarkets around the world.
- American, United, and Delta have grounded all their flights.
- The London Stock Exchange also experienced disruptions.
Major airlines, banks, and supermarkets are experiencing widespread disruptions linked to an IT outage after Microsoft reported problems linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines are among the airlines that have issued ground stops for their aircraft due to communication issues, Reuters reported.
The London Stock Exchange Group's Workspace news and data platform was impacted too, affecting user access worldwide.
"The world grinding to a halt because of a global IT meltdown shows the dark side to technology and that relying on computers doesn't always make life easier," said Dan Coatsworth, an investment analyst at AJ Bell.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue in an X update on Friday morning, writing, "Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions."
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Multiple airports and airlines are warning of disruptions and delays
In Singapore, Changi Airport — one of the world's busiest airports — said it was manually checking in the passengers of some airlines. Local media reports show long queues at Changi Airport's check-in counters.
A spokesperson for Singapore's Changi Airport told BI: "Due to a global outage affecting IT systems of many organizations, the check-in process for some airlines at Changi Airport is being managed manually."
This included the "issuance of boarding passes," the spokesperson said.
In Australia, Melbourne Airport said it was experiencing a "global technology" issue impacting check-in procedures for some airlines. Sydney Airport also reported a global outage affecting airline operations and terminal services, although flights were still arriving and departing the facility.
Delhi Airport in India also said it was impacted. A passenger at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport wrote on X that he had been issued a hand-written boarding pass.
Edinburgh Airport in the UK and Berlin Airport in Germany also warned of delays.
Ryanair, Europe's largest airline, warned of "disruption across the network due to a Global 3rd party IT outage which is out of our control" and is advising passengers to head to the airport early.
On Thursday night, Frontier Airlines issued a ground stop order, saying in a statement: "flight operations are currently being impacted by a major Microsoft technical outage."
CrowdStrike issues
Many of the affected Windows devices displayed an error message — colloquially called the "Blue Screen of Death" — that locks users out of their computers.
An update released by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is believed to have caused the issue. It's unclear if the outage is directly related to Microsoft's systems.
The Austin-headquartered tech giant, which specializes in security for cloud computing platforms, confirmed with CNBC on Friday morning that it was receiving outage reports.
"CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor," CrowdStrike wrote in a message, per CNBC. The Falcon is one of the company's landmark cybersecurity products.
A Reddit forum moderator from the company posted shortly after the outage, saying CrowdStrike was investigating the issue.
"We have widespread reports of BSODs on windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions," the post said.
CrowdStrike's press team did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
The outage is "one of the most significant of cyber issues of 2024," Omer Grossman, the chief information officer at cybersecurity company CyberArk, said in a statement to BI. "The damage to business processes at the global level is dramatic."
He said the glitch came from a software update for CrowdStrike's endpoint detection product.
"A malfunction in this can, as we are seeing in the current incident, cause the operating system to crash," Grossman said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.