Businesses and governments worldwide experienced hours-long disruptions Friday as a widespread technology outage affected services across industries. Flights were grounded and numerous hospitals, small businesses and government offices were disrupted.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
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MEXICO CITY — Long lines of people were waiting for information in several international airports in Mexico as hundreds of people had their travel plans interrupted by delayed and canceled flights Friday.
In Cancún, the main tourist destination on the Caribbean coast, a band was stranded and was playing at the airport, while some travelers livened up their long waits by singing a popular Mexican song, “Cielito Lindo,” with a chorus urging people to sing instead of cry. The title translates roughly to “Lovely Sweet One” or “Sweetheart,” and the song embodies a national sentiment of remaining happy even in the worst moments.
The airport there had 24 canceled and 100 delayed flights.
At the main Mexico City airport, 22 flights were canceled and another 250 were delayed, affecting some 2,000 passengers, especially those traveling to or arriving from the United States, said Rear Admiral José Ramón Rivera, its general director.
Viva Aerobus, a low-cost airline, announced the cancellation of all its international flights scheduled for Friday. Volaris was another of the most affected companies.
In some cities in the north of the country, such as Tijuana, there were delays and long lines at several border crossings. But the Mexican government did not report any damage to its computer systems.
DALLAS — Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates canceled more than a quarter of their schedule on the East Coast by midafternoon Friday, aviation data provider Cirium said.
More than 1,100 flights for Delta and its affiliates have been canceled.
United and United Express had canceled more than 500 flights, or 12% of their schedule, and American Airlines’ network had canceled 450 flights, 7.5% of its schedule.
Southwest and Alaska do not use the CrowdStrike software that led to the global internet outages and had canceled fewer than a half-dozen flights each.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Mayor Ted Wheeler declared an emergency Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by the global internet outage.
Wheeler said during a news conference that while emergency services calls weren’t interrupted, dispatchers were having to manually track 911 calls with pen and paper for a few hours. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.
States and local governments across the U.S. worked to resolve problems caused by the global internet outage.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said critical state IT systems that had suffered from the outage were fully operational by midafternoon.
In Alaska, the state court system repaired every computer workstation and server, completing the task within 12 hours.
“Thankfully, our Information Services team worked overnight repairing as much as possible to ensure that essential functions are operational and that hearings are able to go forward today,” Koford said in an email.
In Kansas, the outage temporarily blocked the public’s online access to court records because it affected servers for the judicial branch’s case management system, according to spokesperson Lisa Taylor. Servers were back up quickly by Friday afternoon — in sharp contrast to the weeks it took to resume online access to court records after a cyberattack in October.
But in other places, the recovery was slower.
Anthony Lewis, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, came to Norfolk County Superior Court outside Boston for a case, only to learn all cases on Friday were rescheduled.
“I drove all the way out here for nothing,” he said.
The White House says it is in regular contact with executives at CrowdStrike, which makes the software tied to the global internet outage. President Joe Biden is continuing to receive updates, officials said.
Federal agencies also are assessing the effects of the CrowdStrike outage on U.S. government operations, the White House said.
SAN DIEGO — People seeking to enter the U.S. from both the north and the south found that the border crossings were delayed by the internet outage.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Even cars with people approved for a U.S. Customers and Border Protection “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The program, known as SENTRI, moves passengers more quickly through customs and passport control if they make an appointment for an interview and submit to a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the U.S.
The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System posted on X that some of its employees who live in Tijuana, Mexico, were unable to get to work Friday. The agency said the disruption may affect its service and encouraged riders to check for delays or detours.
Meanwhile, at the U.S.-Canada border, Windsor Police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
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The dateline has been corrected to San Diego.
BERLIN — Airlines across the world reported disruptions to check-in systems and other issues that caused flights to be grounded or delayed.
German-based airline Eurowings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, called on customers who were traveling inside Germany to book train tickets instead and submit them for reimbursement after it canceled German domestic flights and services to and from the United Kingdom.
At least 100 flights to and from Switzerland’s Zurich Airport were canceled Friday. Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport also saw flights canceled after being hit with the outage. Issues were also reported in the busy European hubs of Amsterdam and Rome.
France’s airport authority reported that some flights were temporarily suspended and there were check-in delays at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports.
Thailand’s two largest airports reported being forced to check in passengers manually.
In South Korea, several low-cost airlines reported problems, triggering delays in passenger boardings at Incheon international Airport, the country’s biggest airport, airport officials said.
In Canada, Porter Airlines said it was canceling its flights for several hours because of the outage. Azul Airlines, a Brazilian low-cost airline, said its check-in systems were affected, causing occasional flight delays.
MINNEAPOLIS — Passengers across the U.S. found themselves facing a miserable experience Friday at some of the nation’s airports.
The FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded.
At the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Sarah Schafer was headed to Florida for her cousin’s 50th birthday party, an event that had been scheduled around her availability.
She had been waiting for almost three hours Friday with no indication of when and where her flight would be rebooked. With lines stretched back the entire of length of her terminal, she stood in line with an injured ankle and used a cane to prop herself up.
“I seem calm,” Schafer said. “But my angry side might come out.”
More than 70 flights were canceled by 7 a.m. at Los Angeles International Airport and passengers were stuck in hours-long waits to get through security or to try to rebook their flights, the Los Angeles Times reported.
At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, many information screens, including those at boarding gates, continued to be stuck on the blue Windows “recovery” screen on Friday afternoon.
Health care providers across the U.S. and in Canada and England had their services disrupted by the global internet outage, though some systems saw little or no effect.
Harris Health System, which runs public hospitals and clinics in the Houston area, said it had to suspend hospital visits “until further notice” due to the outage. Elective hospital procedures were being canceled and rescheduled.
The outage affected records systems for Providence, a health system with 51 hospitals in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington state.
The New York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said it was pausing the start of any procedures that require anesthesia.
In New England, the outage led some hospitals to cancel appointments.
A spokesperson at Mass General Brigham, the largest health care system in Massachusetts, said the outage had resulted in all scheduled nonurgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits being canceled for Friday. Emergency departments remained open.
The 188-hospital HCA Healthcare system said it didn’t expect its ability to provide care to be affected, and in Los Angeles, the Cedars-Sinai Health System remained open and continued to provide care. The Cleveland Clinic also said patient care was not affected.
In Canada, University Health Network, one of that nation’s largest hospital networks, said clinical activity was continuing as scheduled, but some patients may experience delays.
Across the Atlantic, Britain’s National Health Service said there were problems at most doctors’ offices across England as the outage hit the appointment and patient record system used across the health service. The state-funded NHS treats the vast majority of people in the U.K.
The NHS said the 999 number used to call for emergency ambulances wasn’t affected.
People pining for a venti caramel macchiato or a grande frozen mango dragonfruit lemonade found Friday that they couldn’t order ahead from Starbucks online or with their cellphones Friday.
The coffee shop chain apologized for the problem and said it was serving customers in “a vast majority” of its stores and drive-thrus.
BOSTON — Courts in Massachusetts and New York saw their operations disrupted Friday by the global internet outage.
A spokesperson for the Massachusetts judiciary said about half of its workstations were down while court transcription recording systems were not operating in a number of courthouses, resulting in delays in some court sessions.
Some court proceedings were also delayed in New York because of computer problems.
In Manhattan, a criminal court proceeding for Harvey Weinstein, who is charged with rape, started 90 minutes late because of disruptions to court and corrections computer systems.
In Southern California, Orange County Superior Court also reported technical issues.
AUSTIN, Texas — The internet outages forced Texas to close all of its driver’s license offices across the state, and New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles couldn’t process transactions online and in its offices Friday morning.
The Texas Department of Public Safety operates driver’s license offices in most of the state’s 254 counties. The agency issues, renews and updates driver licenses or state ID cards and provides driver education courses.
The department said in a statement that “there is no current estimate” on when the offices will reopen.
In New York, the DMV said that by Friday afternoon, some systems had been restored and that it could begin performing online transactions. However, some in-person services were still offline.
At least three of its DMV offices closed for the day because of the outage, according to the agency’s website.
Zackary Blaine, a 28-year-old living in the New York City suburbs, said he took Friday off work expecting to spend a chunk of the day at the DMV only to find security guards turning people away at the door of his local office.
“I’m not too stressed, but it’s kind of wild to think how much something like this impacts things,” Blaine said by phone later.
SAN FRANCISCO — The head of a nonprofit group that promotes building the internet says outages like the major one affecting Microsoft and causing problems across the globe will happen in the future because of “our world of complex, interconnected systems.”
“The important part is how we learn from them and how we improve the resilience of our systems, so that similar issues do not happen again,” Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the nonprofit Internet Society said Friday.
The outages disrupted flights, banks, media outlets and companies across the world, but Sullivan said there was no loss of connectivity and data continued to flow.
“This was a failure of some systems using a specific operating system and a specific vendor’s management tools,” he said. “Unfortunately, those systems were used widely and for many functions critical to people’s daily lives.”
Meanwhile, some cybersecurity experts are warning that organizations affected by the internet outage should be alert for scammers.
“Organizations should be aware and wary of that and making sure that when they’re talking about getting this problem remediated, that they’re talking to trusted organizations,” said Gartner analyst Eric Grenier. “Attackers will definitely prey on organizations as a result of this.”
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The spelling of Andrew Sullivan’s last name has been corrected.
SANTA ANA — Ports in Southern California saw some disruptions from the internet outage but still were operating.
Mario Cordero, chief executive of the Port of Long Beach, said four marine terminals experienced computer issues but resolved them with minimal disruption.
One of the Port of Los Angeles’ seven terminals had limited operations overnight, said spokesperson Phillip Sanfield.
“Basically, it’s been minimal impact overnight and we’re going to have to wait and see how these terminals come up over the next several hours,” Sanfield said.
SAO PAULO — Bradesco, one of the main banks in Brazil, notified its users via its app that digital services were unstable due to a global cyber outage, but its ATMs were working normally. Bradesco has over 100 million clients.
In South Africa, at least two major banks said they experienced service disruptions as customers complained they weren’t able to make payments using their bank cards at grocery stores and gas stations or use ATMs. Both said they were able to restore services hours later.
TOKYO — Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, western Japan, said the global system outage that started Friday will continue to affect ticket sales at the park over the weekend.
The park said its ticket booths sales will not be available 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 aren’t affected.
Officials in some U.S. states, including Alaska, Virginia and Iowa, warned of problems to 911 emergency call centers in their areas. Alaska State Troopers warned that many 911 and nonemergency call centers across the state weren’t working correctly and shared alternate numbers.
In Virginia, the City of Fairfax Police Department said on social media that it was experiencing technical difficulties with its phone systems, including 911. The department shared a nonemergency number for callers and said 911 could still be used, but calls wouldn’t go directly to the dispatch center.
The New Hampshire Emergency Services and Communications reported a temporary interruption to 911 calls early Friday, with the system fully restored several hours later, officials said. In Iowa, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office warned on social media that phone lines were down and 911 calls might be routed to neighboring counties, but emergency calls would be promptly redirected to the sheriff’s office.
In communities across California, police said they used cellphones to pull up maps and went back to “old-school” methods such as dispatching calls over radio and writing out police reports by hand.
“We just go back to people writing it down,” San Diego Sheriff’s Lt. Gavin Lanning told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It wasn’t as easy as normal.”
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The National Center for Cyber Security in Sri Lanka says four information technology companies in Sri Lanka have been affected because of the global outage.
Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is known as Sri Lanka CERT, says that so far only four companies have informed them of being affected and the center attributed them to a problem with the cybersecurity platform CrowdStrike.
Charuka Damunupola, lead information security engineer at Sri Lanka CERT, says those companies were using CrowdStrike software and their systems “are in failure mode.”
BERLIN — A German regional grocery chain, Tegut, temporarily shut its 340 stores in the country Friday morning as the computer outage affected cash register systems.
By early afternoon, more than half of the stores were open again.
LONDON — The London Stock Exchange says it is experiencing disruptions from the technology outage that has created chaos around the globe.
The LSE says its regulatory news service was not working Friday morning, but the outage hadn’t affected trading.
“We are currently experiencing a third party technical issue which is impacting some of our services,” a London Stock Exchange Group spokesperson said in a statement.
The exchange says it’s trying to resolve the problem as soon as possible.
LONDON — The chief executive of the cybersecurity company at the heart of a worldwide Microsoft outage says it is working to fix a defect sent out in a Windows update.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on X. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Kurtz said there was a defect in a “single content update for Windows hosts.” Mac and Linux hosts weren’t affected.
The company referred customers to its support portal for updates.
HELSINKI — Two pharmacy chains in Norway said they are having problems providing customers with their prescription medicine and are facing substantial connection delays because of the global network problems.
Several branches of the Apotek1 pharmacy have closed across Norway after being affected by IT issues, which also shut down the chain’s online sales, the Norwegian news agency NTB reported.
The Boots drugstore and pharmacy chain also ran into problems delivering products to clients in Norway. Boots said that “due to global network problems, you may experience challenges with ordering and possible delays in dispatches,” NTB reported.
PARIS — Paris Olympics organizers say some Olympic delegations’ arrivals, as well as the delivery of some uniforms and accreditations, have been delayed because of the outage.
The organizers said in a statement that ticketing and the torch relay haven’t been affected.
“Our teams have been fully mobilized to ensure the continuity of operations at optimum levels,” organizers said.
WARSAW — Baltic Hub, a major container hub in the Baltic port of Gdansk, Poland, says it’s battling problems resulting from the global system outage.
Their entry gates are temporarily closed and they have suspended business, the Baltic Hub said in a statement.