Airlines, banks, TV channels and other business across the globe were scrambling yesterday to deal with one of the biggest IT crashes over the past few years, caused by an update to an antivirus software.
Aviation officials in the US briefly grounded all planes, while airlines elsewhere canceled or delayed flights, as systems running Microsoft Windows crashed.
Microsoft said the issue began at 7pm GMT on Thursday, affecting users of its Azure cloud platform running cybersecurity software CrowdStrike Falcon.
Photo: AFP
“We recommend customers that are able to, to restore from a backup from before this time,” the US software giant said in a technical update on its Web site.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on several social media platforms said that a fix had been rolled out for the problem, describing it as a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
Experts suggested applying the fix would not be straightforward.
The global nature of the failure prompted some commentators to question the reliance on a single provider for such a variety of services.
Shares in CrowdStrike slumped by 20 percent in premarket trading.
From Amsterdam to Zurich, Singapore to Hong Kong, airport operators flagged technical issues that were disrupting their services.
Some airports told planes they could not land, while in others airline staff began checking in passengers manually.
“I’m just in limbo as to how long I’ve got to wait here,” traveler Alexander Ropicano told reporters as he waited at Sydney Airport in Australia.
The 24-year-old, flying to Brisbane to see his girlfriend, said the airline told him to “wait until the system is operational again.”
The US Federal Aviation Administration in a notice to airlines early yesterday said that all flights “regardless of destination” were to be grounded.
However, American Airlines later said that as of 9am GMT “we have been able to safely re-establish our operation.”
“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the airline said.
Major airports including Berlin, which had suspended flights earlier yesterday, said departures and arrivals were gradually resuming.
Meanwhile, Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport said its airline systems got disrupted.
Airlines including AirAsia X, Tigerair Taiwan, Jetstar Airways, HK Express Airways, Jeju Air and Scoot were affected by the technical issue, the airport said.
Airline staff resorted to conducting passenger registration and seat allocation procedures manually, after Microsoft cloud-based booking-management system Navitaire was impacted by the outage, airport authorities said.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs issued a statement saying the ministry “inspected the status and operations of critical government information systems,” including the household registration and tax systems, as soon as the technical issue was discovered.
Critical government information systems were not affected and were operating normally, although some personal computers had malfunctioned, the ministry said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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