UPDATE: Cyberattack ruled out as IT outage wreaks havoc worldwide

Computer issues were causing major disruption worldwide on Friday, affecting airlines and airports, media outlets, banks and telecommunication companies.

Airports from Berlin and Zurich to New Delhi and Sydney were among those that reported various degrees of service disruptions, caused by an update from IT security company — CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike boss, George Kurtz, posted on social media platform X that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

A spokesperson for software giant, Microsoft, said that the company was “aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform.

“We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.”

Airports also reported major disruption, as passengers across the world have been asked to check the status of their flights, with many airlines reporting difficulties with check-in.

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration has stopped flights by major airlines such as United, American and Delta.

The European budget airlines, Ryanair and Eurowings, also had their operations disrupted, although German carrier, Lufthansa, said it was only “slightly” impacted.

Also, Dutch airline, KLM, said “the outage made flight handling impossible” and was largely suspending its operations.

Zurich Airport said it would restrict landings, although arriving flights that have already taken off were still able to land.

Turkey’s national flag carrier, Turkish Airlines, said it was currently experiencing problems with ticketing, check-in and reservation processes in a post on social media platform — X.

At Sydney Airport, passengers were told that they could not check in luggage, with domestic and international flights affected.

In India, boarding passes were being filled out manually as check-in was disrupted at New Delhi’s main airport.

Contingency plans were also in place at Heathrow Airport in London, the airport said, with Gatwick Airport also warning against delays.

Broadcasters and healthcare sectors were also affected

The global IT outage has caused difficulties across a wide range of sectors on Friday.

In the UK, broadcaster Sky News was knocked off the air for hours, while several television channels in France were also affected.

Australian radio stations were reportedly broadcasting music via CDs and USB sticks after computer systems went down.

Emergency services were hit in Denmark, with the Copenhagen fire department reporting problems with receiving automatic fire alarm warnings.

The healthcare sector in Denmark has also been affected.

In northern Germany, the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein said it was cancelling all planned operations at its facilities in the cities of Kiel and Lübeck were affected.

Australian banks were also said to be struggling to deal with the IT outage. In response, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese convened an emergency meeting.

Global Technology Glitch: Delta suspend flights

Delta Air Lines, one of the major airlines of the United States, says it has paused all flights following a vendor technology issue experienced across all markets that occured in the early hours of Friday.

The information is in a statement from Delta’s Corporate Communications Department on Friday in Lagos.

The statement noted that customers whose flights were impacted would be notified by Delta via the Fly Delta app and text messages.

It urged customers to use the Fly Delta app for updates, adding that “we apologise for the inconvenience, as our teams work through this issue.

“Reports indicated that other airlines may also be impacted.”

In the early hours of July 18, a technical issue with a vendor impacted many carries in the United States, causing flight delays and total pause in flight operations.

Amerian Air on its verified X account, while apologising to its customers, assured that the issues had been resolved.

United Airlines, on its verified X account also said that it would be issuing waivers to make it easier for passengers to change travel plans on its website and at Waiver: uafly.co/alerts.

The airline said in the post that a third-party outage is impacting computer systems, affecting
many organisations worldwide.

It added that “as we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming. Many customers travelling today may experience delays.”

However, Qatar Airways disclosed that the technology issues was not affecting its international flight operations as of yet.

KLM Airlines also gave its customers a heads up as it stated that there might be flight delays and cancellations due to the glitch.

The disruption has been linked to a downtime experienced with Microsoft internet services and issues with Cloudstrike.

Microsoft had in a statement, said a configuration change in a portion of ‘our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources’ resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

Microsoft also said that the issue may impact any user attempting to use various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

It added that “services affected include — PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Microsoft Purview.

“We will continue to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact,” Microsoft said.

The organisation noted that Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Intune, OneDrive for business, and SharePoint Online, are some of its services that have been restored.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on its verified X page said it was closely monitoring the issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines as several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved.