A global IT outage disrupted business around the world on Friday, affecting a wide range of services from airlines to financial institutions and media companies.
Social networks attributed the outage to a CrowdStrike security software update that caused problems with Windows software. The outage affected businesses in several countries, including Australia.
Airports in Europe
Airports in Europe have warned passengers of possible delays due to IT problems.
Similarly, there was a “technical fault” at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, which delayed the check-in of passengers.
Spain’s main airport operator, Aena, said operations were being carried out manually due to an “incident” in its IT system, which could cause delays across its network. Aena is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Ryanair also reported a “third party IT issue” affecting all airlines across the network and beyond its control.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has announced that it is investigating a technical issue that is preventing reports from being published. While other systems, including the exchange, were operating normally, the LSEG intelligence service was facing a “third-party global technical issue”.
American airlines were discontinued
Major US carriers including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines grounded on Friday morning due to communication issues, less than an hour after Microsoft resolved an outage in cloud services that affected several low-cost carriers.
It was not immediately clear whether the call to prevent the flight was related to an earlier Microsoft cloud outage. In addition to American and Delta, UAL and Allegiant Air also grounded flights.
Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry have previously reported outages affecting operations. Frontier said late Thursday that it was in the process of restoring normal operations and that the ground shutdown had been lifted.
Frontier previously said its operations were temporarily affected by a “major Microsoft technical outage,” while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its reservation and check-in facilities, without naming the company.
Media, retailers, banks, airlines, telecommunications hit Australia, New Zealand
The cyber outage, linked to an issue by global cyber firm Crowdstrike and Microsoft, affected media, retailers, banks, airlines and telecommunications companies across Australia and New Zealand on Friday.
Australia’s largest bank Commonwealth Bank said some customers were unable to transfer money due to service outages. National airline Qantas and Sydney Airport said planes were delayed but still flying.
Sydney Airport has announced a “global technical outage” has affected its operations and advised passengers to expect delays, although flights are still departing and arriving as scheduled.
Victorian State Police said the outage affected some internal systems but emergency services were operating normally. The production of a number of media companies was also disrupted.
“Like many other organizations, the global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems,” a Telstra spokesman said on Friday.
“This issue is causing some delays for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.”
Crowdstrike released a recorded phone message on Friday when Reuters contacted its technical support, saying it was aware of reports of Microsoft Windows operating system crashes related to its Falcon sensor, without mentioning Australia.
There is 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.
“I am aware of the widespread technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” said the statement, which did not name Crowdstrike.
“Our current information is that this outage is related to a technical issue with a third-party software platform used by the affected companies.”
A spokesman for New Zealand’s parliament said its computer systems were also affected.
State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage” without giving a reason.
In a pre-recorded report played on Sky News Australia when regular programming was interrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.
“Our computers, our systems are down, all those things that cause outages for Sky News and of course for many other big companies around the country,” he said.
A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on Friday.
Sky News offline
Britain’s Sky News, one of the country’s main television news stations, was off the air on Friday.
“Sky News was unable to broadcast live television this morning and is currently informing viewers that we apologize for the disruption,” the broadcaster’s executive chairman David Rhodes said on X.
The global technical outage affected operations in various countries, including Spanish airports, a Turkish airline and Australian media and banks.
Microsoft indicated early Friday that some Azure cloud computing customers in the central U.S. region may experience issues with multiple Azure services. The company identified the root cause as a technical issue, not a cyber attack, and said “most services are now restored”.
Still, broader outages persisted, affecting access to Microsoft 365’s suite of apps and services, including Teams. Microsoft has assured that it is addressing the issue with the “highest priority and urgency”, although users will experience “gradual relief” as the issues are resolved, all stemming from an Azure issue.
