Global IT outage: 24 hours later and impacts are still being seen across the world
Written by ABC AUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED on July 20, 2024
(NEW YORK) — Over 1,100 flights have been canceled and 2,867 delayed in the U.S. as private and public sector industries continue to be impacted by the the CrowdStrike outage around the world more than a day after it began. While many businesses appear to have recovered, the issue has not yet been fully resolved.
The outage impacted 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft, sparking global chaos with airline, bank and other disruptions. Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm, is not owned by Microsoft but still operates largely on their systems.
“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Microsoft said in a post.
The outage came from a faulty software update sent to computers running Microsoft Windows by CrowdStrike, causing flights to be grounded, disruptions to financial services and hospital systems to be knocked offline.
Rebooting systems multiple times worked for some agencies while others continue to be impacted, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report reviewed by ABC News.
Multiple U.S. government facilities have reported not being able to operate because they do not have access to multiple Microsoft 360 applications. Election related and voting registration databases in Arizona, South Dakota, Texas and Washington state were impacted by the outage as well, according to the report.
While American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Airlines issued a global ground stop on Friday due to communications issues, TSA systems were not impacted, according to the report. There are at least 1,143 cancelled flights in the U.S. on Saturday, far fewer than the over 3,200 cancelations on Friday.
Delta continues to be the airline most impacted by the outage and Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport continues to see the highest number of delays and cancellations on Saturday.
American Airlines said it has “fully recovered” and canceled less than 1% of flights today — 43 flights.
Emergency 911 systems that were affected by the outage switched to fully operational backup systems, according to the DHS report.
It was early Friday when reports started coming in that a tech outage was beginning to knock services offline across the globe, a cascading effect that would impact millions.
In an update Friday night, the company said they were “actively working with customers impacted” by the issue.
Hospital systems like Mass General Brigham, who halted elective and non-emergency surgeries yesterday, said they would be working through the night and expect to be fully operational on Saturday.
“We are doing everything possible to restore the electronic systems that support our patient care delivery across our system. Our teams will continue to work throughout the night to implement solutions and, at this time, we expect to be operational on Saturday, July 20, 2024,” Mass General Brigham said in a statement late Friday.
-ABC News’ Ayesha Ali and Luke Barr contributed to this report
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