Global IT Outage and Disruption Associated with Crowdstrike: Flights, Networks, and Online Services at Amsterdam and Airports

An X user posted a picture of an alert from Crowdstrike, which said the company is aware of crashes on Windows hosts related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be verified. Crowdstrike did not respond to a request for comment.

News outlets in Australia — including the ABC and Sky News — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels, and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows-based computers. In front of computers with blue screens of death, some newsanchors broadcast live from their dark offices.

Australian outages reported on the site included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.

There will be delays at the airport due to a technical fault. It said that flights were suspended until 10 a.m. (0800GMT), without giving details, German news agency dpa reported.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport said on its website that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The airport had one of its busiest days of the year with many people going for summer vacations.

At Australian airports, lines grew and passengers were stranded due to online check-in services being disabled. People in Melbourne wait for more than an hour to check in.

“We’re currently experiencing disruption across the network due to a global third party IT outage which is out of our control,’’ Ryanair said. “We advise all passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their scheduled departure time.”

Airlines, railways and television stations in the United Kingdom were being disrupted by the computer issues. Sky News is also affected, as are the budget airline and train operators.

Microsoft posted that they were working on redirecting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact and that they wereobserving a positive trend in service availability.

The website DownDectector, which tracks internet outages, reported growing problems with Visa, Amazon, and American Airlines and Delta.

Escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Disruptions caused by Friday’s global tech outage continued into Saturday, as employees of airlines, banks, hospitals and other crucial businesses worked to catch up from the backlog caused by the historic technological meltdown that affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide.

Airlines were playing the biggest catchup game, after carriers were forced to cancel thousands of flights on Friday, leaving planes and crews stuck in the wrong locations. As of Saturday afternoon, nearly 1,500 flights across the U.S. had been canceled for the day, with another 4,600 delayed, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware.

A American told NPR that she was stuck in London after her flight to New York was delayed because of the outage.

She thanked the customer service reps at the airport who helped her to rebook her flight and said it shows that we are so reliant on technology.

The Boston General Brigham Hospital System in a Critical State after the Power Outage on Friday, Dec. 30, 2001: CrowdStrike Reconnected

After canceling surgeries and other appointments because of the power going out on Friday, Massachusetts General Brigham was back to being operational on Saturday.

“Our response teams are continuing to work diligently throughout the weekend to address the many additional downstream impacts across our system from the CrowdStrike failure,” Noah Brown, the hospital’s director of global communications, told NPR in a written statement.

In a statement, the Austin-based CrowdStrike said it was “actively working with customers” whose screens were impacted by the incident, confirming it was not a cyberattack.

“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president for enterprise and OS security, wrote in a blog post.