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A faulty software update has caused global turmoil, grounding flights, knocking banks and media outlets offline, and disrupting hospitals, small businesses and other services in Australia and around the world.
The troubled update came from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and affected computers running Microsoft Windows. CrowdStrike said it was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, apologised and said a fix was on the way.
But many hours later, disruptions continued — and escalated.
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Long lines formed at airports in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services — at a time when many travellers are heading away on summer vacations in the northern hemisphere.
Overseas, hospitals and doctors' offices had problems with their appointment systems, and cancelled non-urgent surgeries.
Several TV stations in the US were also prevented from airing local news early on Friday.
Saskia Oettinghaus, a member of the German Olympic diving team, was among those stuck at the Berlin Airport.
"We are on our way to Paris for the Olympic Games and now we are at a standstill here for the time being," Oettinghaus said.
Other athletes and spectators travelling to Paris were delayed, as were their uniforms and accreditations, but Games organisers said disruptions were limited and didn't affect ticketing or the torch relay.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that by 1am AEST, more than 3300 flights had been cancelled around the world, about 3 per cent of the 110,000 commercial flights scheduled to take off on Friday.
That number was expected to grow as knock-on effects kick in across the day.
Airlines and airports
Airports around the world reported outages and delays, including at Christchurch International Airport in New Zealand, Prague Airport and Singapore's Changi airport.
Some of Europe's busiest airports including Amsterdam Schiphol and London's Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted airports were impacted.
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"Flights are operational though we are experiencing delays," a Heathrow Airport spokesperson said earlier.
While Heathrow was "implementing contingency plans to minimise any impact on journeys", it was listed as experiencing "excessive delays" on Cirium's flight tracker.
Gatwick was marked as "excessive and decreasing" and Birmingham International Airport was still experiencing "significant" delays.
The UK's rail network was significantly impacted, with at least 14 rail operators saying they were experiencing difficulties.
Dutch airline KLM was forced to "largely" suspend operations on Friday, saying that flight handling was "impossible" in the wake of the outage.
Even when the airline returned to being online, it warned of delays across the weekend.
"The IT malfunction that caused disruptions worldwide for airlines and airports today has been almost completely resolved at KLM," KLM said on X.
"Air traffic to and from Schiphol can be fully resumed. However, many flights have been delayed or cancelled out of necessity. These disruptions in the schedule are expected to continue this evening (CET) and into the weekend as we restart our flight operations.
"As a result, it is possible that we will need to cancel more flights to get the operation back on track."
Six Indian airlines and Delhi airport were reportedly impacted, with one user on X sharing a handwritten boarding pass they had been issued.
At Belfast Airport, whiteboards were brought out as an improvised departures board, according to passengers who shared photos on social media.
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The situation has reportedly eased at Edinburgh airport, where the chaos became so bad that the airport stopped accepting incoming flights, according to the BBC.
Berlin's Brandenburg airport issued a message of delays at check-in, while AENA, which manages 46 airports in Spain, said it were suffering delays as it switched to manual systems.
The check-in process for some airlines at Dubai International Airport had been briefly impacted but soon returned to "operating normally".
AirAsia and Cebu Pacific Air were also among the airlines resorting to manual check-in processes.
Hong Kong Airport was reportedly in "chaos", with check-ins being done manually, but flights were still taking off.
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Cathay Pacific said its online flight booking service was unavailable.
Singapore Airlines noted on X that none of its flights had been impacted, but that it was experiencing technical difficulties. The issue was soon resolved, with the airline saying its hotline and service centre were "back to normal".
Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok and Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila also both had lengthy queues due to delays.
Japan's Narita airport, near Tokyo, said airlines there – including Jetstar and Qantas – were having issues.
In the US three major airlines – American Airlines, United and Delta – issued a "global ground stop" on all of their flights earlier, with American Airlines saying it had since "safely re-established" operations.
The White House said it was "looking into" the disruption.
"We're aware of the incident and are looking into the issue and impacts," a White House National Security Council spokesperson told CNN.
US President Joe Biden has been briefed on the outage, despite convalescing after testing positive for COVID-19.
Healthcare services
Emergency services and 911 outages were reported across several US states.
The full reach of the outages was not immediately clear on a national scale, but the Federal Communications Commission said it was working to assess the impacts.
There were reports of 911 outages in various states, like Alaska, and cities, like Phoenix, where the system was down for hours but has since been restored.
University Health Network, one of Canada's largest hospital networks, said that some of its systems had been impacted. In a post to social media, it said clinical activity was continuing as scheduled, but some patients may experience delays.
The German University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), one of Europe's largest medical care facilities, cancelled all elective procedures on Friday at both locations in the cities of Kiel and Lübeck, northern Germany. Outpatient clinics were also closed.
In Norway, two pharmacy chains said they were having problems providing customers with their prescription medicine and were facing substantial connection delays due to the global network problems.
In the UK, there were reports the outage was impacting the National Health Service (NHS) systems and GPs were only seeing the most unwell patients.
The London Ambulance Service reported "huge increases" in calls in the wake of the outage.
"Following the global IT outage that has impacted some NHS services across the capital, our call handlers and ambulance crews are incredibly busy with huge increases in the number of calls to both our 999 and 111 services," chief executive Daniel Elkeles said.
"In fact, by 2pm today, we had received more than 3000 999 calls and 3000 calls to our 111 services – this is a third higher than we would usually receive in a full 24-hour period."
Pharmacies were being impacted, with the National Pharmacy Association urging "patients to be patient whilst visiting their pharmacy".
British supermarkets Sainsbury's, Tesco and Morrisons were all impacted, with some only accepting cash.
The UK government held an emergency meeting to discuss the tech outage, Downing Street said on Friday.
"We recognise the impact this is having on services and the Government is working closely with the respective sectors and industries on this issue, which is affecting services not only across the UK but also globally," a Downing Street spokesperson told reporters.
The spokesperson added that she is not aware of any government business being hit by the outage.
Finance
UK banks and betting agencies were hit.
The London Stock Exchange told CNN that its real-time platforms were back up and running after a four-hour outage.
The disruption affected the LSE's news service and FTSE Russell real-time indexes, a spokesperson said.
Borsa Italiana, the company that manages Milan's stock exchange, said the "correct disclosure of the index FTSE MIB has been restored".
Malaysia's Bursa Malaysia Bhd stock exchange said the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI index value feed is "experiencing service disruption" and that the company is investigating the matter, according to Malaysia's national news agency Bernama.
Some New Zealand banks said they were also offline and a spokesperson for New Zealand's parliament says their computer network is having issues.
Theme parks
Universal Studios Japan in Osaka said the global system outage would impact ticket sales at the park over the weekend.
The park said its ticket booths sales would not be available on Saturday and Sunday and asked visitors to purchase their tickets on the USJ official website or via designated ticket sales site Lawson Ticket. Park attractions were not affected.
Similarly, Hong Kong Disneyland said its online ticketing system was down due and asked park visitors to purchase on-day tickets from a ticket booth at the park's entrance.
Olympics
The outage was also impacting the lead up to the Paris Olympics, with organisers saying some delegations' arrivals, as well as the delivery of some uniforms and accreditations, had been delayed because as a result of the outage.
The organisers said in a statement that ticketing and the torch relay have not been affected.
"Our teams have been fully mobilised to ensure the continuity of operations at optimum levels," organisers said.
CrowdStrike CEO faces the media
During an interview on NBC's Today Show on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised for the outage, saying the company was "deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies."
"We know what the issue is" and are working to remediate it, Kurtz said.
"It was only the Microsoft operating system" that was affected, though it didn't happen on every Microsoft Windows system, he said.
The Austin, Texas-based company's shares were down nearly 10 per cent in early trading Friday.
A recording playing on its customer service line said, "CrowdStrike is aware of the reports of crashes on Microsoft ports related to the Falcon sensor," referring to one of its products used to block online attacks.
– Reported with Associated Press and CNN.
