On Friday, a massive global technology outage caused disruptions to airlines, medical services, TV broadcasts, banks, and numerous other businesses worldwide.
This event was a show of the dependence that the global economy has on specific software and the extensive consequences when systems fail.
The outage was linked to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used globally to defend against hackers and breaches.
A software update from CrowdStrike seemed to be the cause of the issue, leading to crashes on machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” said George Kurtz, the Chief Executive Officer at CrowdStrike.
Although the technical problem is soon to be resolved, the ripple effects on affected airlines and airports are likely to persist throughout the day and could worsen before improving.
Airlines around the world are cancelling flights as a global IT outage impacts operations. Companies in the United States, UK, India, and Australia are among those badly affected.
Plane tracking service Flightradar24 reported severe delays affecting arrivals and departures at major airports around the world. Heathrow, Las Vegas, and Sydney are among the international hubs reporting problems.
Earlier, Microsoft announced it was taking mitigation actions in response to the service issues.
Heathrow Airport was one of the major organizations that mentioned Microsoft in its statement about the problem. Microsoft reported that the outage began around midnight Friday (EAT).
The outage was also being felt at airports around the world, including Hong Kong International Airport, Sydney Airport, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and Denver International Airport.
At Manchester Airport in England, there were long lines in the departures area as many machines at check-in counters were not working.
Ryanair, one of the largest airlines in Europe, said it was experiencing disruption because of a third-party IT outage that is entirely out of their control