(Reuters) — A global tech outage was disrupting operations in multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to health care hit by system problems. This disruption followed the Microsoft IT outage,
U.S. carriers American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded flights citing communication problems. The order came shortly after Microsoft said it had resolved its cloud services outage that had impacted several low-cost carriers, though it was not immediately clear whether those were related. #MicrosoftITOutage
“A third party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United. While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports,” United said in a statement. “Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
Australia’s government said media, banks, and telecom outages seemed linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. #MicrosoftITOutage
Crowdstrike’s alert revealed that its “Falcon Sensor” software causes Microsoft Windows to crash. This issue results in the infamous “Blue Screen of Death.”
The alert, which was sent at 0530 GMT on Friday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.
There was 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.
The outages rippled far and wide.
