The global technology outage that began early Friday has affected banks and other financial firms, along with airlines, airports and media companies, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets reported.
The outage appeared to be caused by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by many companies worldwide to protect against security breaches. A faulty software update issued by CrowdStrike apparently resulting in the crashing of many computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” CrowdStrike’s CEO said early Friday on X, as some services appeared to be resuming and American Airlines said it was able to “safely re-establish” operations, the Post reported.
Microsoft said that its customers should follow instructions from CrowdStrike to fix the outage, the Times reported. “We are aware of a scenario in which customers experience issues with their machines causing a bug check (blue screen) due to a recent CrowdStrike update. We recommend customers to follow guidance provided by CrowdStrike,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Reuters reported Friday morning that the following financial companies were affected:
• Australia's largest bank, Commonwealth Bank said that earlier issues affecting PayID instant transfers had been resolved. Services including Netbank, the CommBank app, CommBiz, merchant payments and ATMs are available.
• Several major oil and gas trading desks in London and Singapore were struggling to execute trades.
•Macquarie Capital was unable to provide liquidity for unexpired warrants on HKEX, Asia's premier international capital market.
•South Africa's Capitec said card payments, ATM and app services were fully restored following significant nationwide disruptions.
• LSEG Group's Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage that affected user access worldwide, causing disruption across financial markets. It said in a client memo that technical problems on FX spot and forward rates have been resolved and services restored.
• Some brokerages in India are facing technical difficulties.
• German insurer Allianz said it was experiencing a major outage that is impacting employees' ability to log on to their computers.
•Some German banks are facing disruptions, a spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association, said on Friday, without providing further details.
•Barclays said its digital investing platform Smart Investor was impacted.
•Brazilian lender Bradesco said its digital platforms were unavailable on Friday.
Several major U.S. airlines—including American Airlines, United and Delta—grounded flights early Friday, the Post reported. In addition, some 911 call centers, as well as IT services of the Paris Olympics, were affected.
Reuters also reported on outages at major media companies. Britain's Sky News resumed broadcasting after an hours-long outage, but was operating at minimal capacity and without many of its usual services. Australia's state broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a "major network outage", without giving a reason. AndRegular programming at Sky News Australia was disrupted.
In an interview with the Times, Thomas Parenty, a cybersecurity consultant and former National Security Agency analyst, explained why the outage was so extensive: “One of the tricky parts of security software is it needs to have absolute privileges over your entire computer in order to do its job. … So if there’s something wrong with it, the consequences are vastly greater than if your spreadsheet doesn’t work.”