Global Cyber Outage Grounds Flights, Disrupts Businesses

On Friday, major U.S. airlines issued a ground halt due to communications concerns, while other carriers, media corporations, banks, and telecoms firms worldwide reported system outage

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air grounded flights within an hour of Microsoft’s announcement that it had remedied the cloud services outage that had affected numerous low-cost carriers.

It was not immediately apparent whether the request to prevent flights from taking off was connected to an earlier Microsoft cloud outage.

The government has reported that disruptions were experienced by media, banks, and telecommunications companies in Australia, and they are believed to be associated with an issue at the global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Several banks and telecommunications companies were identified as experiencing disruptions on the crowdsourced website Downdetector.

When Reuters contacted Crowdstrike’s technical assistance on Friday, the company responded with a recorded phone message that it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system related to its Falcon sensor. The message did not mention Australia.

The office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator, Michelle McGuinness, stated in a post on X that there was no evidence to imply that the outage was a cyber security incident.

Spain reported a “computer incident” at all its airports. Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions that would affect “all airlines operating across the Network.” However, the nature of the disruptions needed to be specified. The outages had a far-reaching impact.

In a statement, the cloud service provider AWS stated that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”

It was not immediately apparent whether all reported disruptions were associated with Crowdstrike issues or if other issues were at play.