Microsoft outage disrupts global IT; Airlines ground flights, CrowdStrike blames Windows update

An airline employee holds up a sign informing travelers as they line up at the check-in counters of the Hong Kong International Airport this morning.

Crowds build up at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.

An employee at Berlin Airport speaks tries to update passengers as widespread outages caused mass confusion.

George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, the company at the center of today’s enormous IT outages, says the problems could persist for some time yet.

“It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover,” Kurtz told NBC’s “TODAY” show this morning.

Kurtz said the company was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” adding the issue has been fixed on their end.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said. “We’re just trying to sort out where the negative interaction was,” he said of the faulty update that affected Windows PCs.

The Microsoft cloud computing outages that left airports, shops and broadcasters without services will not be easily fixed, tech experts have warned.

Fixing the issues may involve a manual effort on the part of users, Omer Grossman, CIO at cybersecurity firm CyberArk, told CNBC.

“It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed — the Blue Screen of Death — they cannot be updated remotely and this the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days,” he said.

Show more

Commuters riding the bus and train services in New York will have to listen closely to station announcements after the MTA’s systems were taken offline due to the outage.

The “train and bus service is unaffected,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority said this morning in a statement.

Washington’s transit agency, WMATA, said the train’s start time of 5 a.m. was delayed and commuters could experience more delays on its buses and trains.

Travelers walk past a departures board displaying a blue error screen in Newark International Airport this morning.

The New Hampshire Department of Safety said its 911 service was back online early today after an interruption related to the global outage of Microsoft cloud computing services that began around 1 a.m. ET.

“911 server system has been fully restored and emergency calls to 911 are being processed normally,” the department’s division of emergency services and communications said in an update, which confirmed the service was back as of 3 a.m.

It said the cause of the outage was under investigation but the department was “aware of information technology outages reported nationwide.” The department also urged people not to see if 911 is working with “test calls.”

NBC News’ business and data correspondent Brian Cheung explains that CrowdStrike is deploying a fix that caused computer outages worldwide. He said people should not try calling 911 to test the system.

When Patricia Sweeney arrived at gate 133 of Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, her American Airlines flight bound for New York was nowhere to be found. It was first delayed by an hour, then canceled.

“I’m upset but taking it in strides,” said Sweeney, who lives in Brooklyn and works in finance and was on a business trip. Another American Airlines flight next to her gate was also canceled. “You could just hear a roar of the passengers,” she said. “People are not happy.”

As she waited for updates from the airline, Sweeney went to the business class lounge which was overcrowded with other affected passengers.

“I told the hotel I had stayed at to rebook a room. But they said they had a system outage,” she said over the phone while waiting for her baggage. The hotel rebooked her manually.

While Sweeney was offered a flight for tomorrow morning by the airline, she said a representative later told her that it’s still not confirmed.

The outage happened while most stores in the United States were closed for the night. But it has been wreaking havoc elsewhere.

In Britain, grocery chain Waitrose put up signs in some of its outlets warning customers it was only accepting cash.

“All card-readers have failed this morning!” read a handwritten message in one branch in Petersfield, southern England “Sorry for any inconvenience caused!”

In Australia and New Zealand, scores of people posted on social media that they were locked out of their online bank accounts.

“We’re aware of issues currently impacting many banks and businesses across NZ,” the state-owned Kiwibank said on X, replying to a number of users reporting problems. “Our teams are working to resolve the access issues impacting our app and internet banking at the moment, and we hope to have this resolved shortly.”

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike saw its shares plunge today, after an update led to a major outage impacting businesses across the world.

Shares of the company, which makes software to help firms manage their security in IT environments, tanked 15% in U.S. premarket trading.

Microsoft, which also reported issues affecting its Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps, fell 2% in premarket trading.

Read the full story here.