Global IT Crash That Blocked 911 Calls and Grounded Planes Is Eased

(Bloomberg) — In what will go down as the most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. brought down countless Microsoft Windows computer systems around the world.

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Microsoft Corp. and CrowdStrike have released fixes and systems are being restored. But for several hours, bankers in Hong Kong, doctors in the United Kingdom and emergency responders in New Hampshire found themselves excluded from programs essential to keeping their operations running.

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“This is unprecedented,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. “The economic impact will be enormous.”

The catastrophic failure highlights an increasingly serious threat to global supply chains: the IT systems of some of the world’s largest and most critical industries have become heavily dependent on a handful of relatively obscure software vendors, who are now emerging. as single points of failure. In recent months, hackers have exploited this phenomenon, targeting suppliers to bring down entire industries and governments.

Adding to the outage, Microsoft faced a separate and apparently unrelated issue with its Azure cloud service on Thursday that lasted several hours. On Friday afternoon, the company said in a post on X that all Microsoft 365 apps and services have been restored.

By New York morning, many systems were coming back online. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a post before 6 a.m. on X that the flaw had been identified and that the company had deployed a “fix” that required a manual restart of Windows machines. Microsoft later said it had resolved the underlying cause of its IT problem.

CrowdStrike shares were down 11% at 9:45 a.m. in New York trading, wiping about $7.4 billion off its market value. Shares fell as much as 15% earlier in the day, the biggest intraday drop since February. Microsoft shares were little changed at $437.65.

There are precedents for such interruptions. In 2017, a series of errors in Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service affected the operation of tens of thousands of websites. In 2021, problems with the Fastly content distribution network eliminated several media networks, including Bloomberg News. The outages also disabled Amazon’s AWS cloud service.

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But none of them approached the scale of the CrowdStrike outage, which hit airlines, banks and healthcare systems, and whose repercussions are still being felt.

“I don’t think it’s too early to say this: this will be the biggest IT outage in history,” said Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and creator of hacker-checking site Have I Been Pwned, in a social media post. X media platform.

Airlines

Airport hubs from Berlin to Delhi faced delays, cancellations and stranded passengers on a particularly busy day for travel. FlightAware said more than 21,000 flights were delayed worldwide.

gradually resumed operations on Friday, although the effects of the disruption may continue for several days due to the busy flying season.

Other U.S. airlines that temporarily suspended flights included American Airlines Group Inc. and Spirit Airlines Inc., according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Finance

The London Stock Exchange Group has resolved an issue preventing the exchange from publishing news on its website through RNS, a service that publicly listed companies use to distribute price-sensitive regulatory announcements.

Several banks were forced to revert to backup systems during the IT failure. Bankers from JPMorgan Chase & Co., Nomura Holdings Inc. and Bank of America Corp. were unable to log in for part of the day on Friday and Haitong Securities Co.’s trading desk was unable to log in for part of the day.

Health

The disruptions also affected critical infrastructure, including emergency services.

Doctors from the UK’s National Health Service were unable to access scans, blood tests and patient histories. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Boston-based Mass General Brigham warned that the CrowdStrike issue was affecting patient care. Hospitals in Europe reported having to close clinics and cancel procedures.

New York’s 911 and emergency systems were also affected. While the state’s chief cyber officer said fixes were underway, there was no clarity on when services would be fully restored. New Hampshire’s 911 emergency services are working again after an outage in which operators could see calls coming in but were unable to answer them.

–With assistance from Mayumi Negishi, Shona Ghosh, Kati Pohjanpalo, Celeste Perri and Danny Lee.

(Updates throughout)

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