My wife and daughter are stuck on an airplane in Paris, due to a worldwide IT outage at Microsoft. Their plane landed in Paris, but they can’t continue on to the United States because the outage has interfered with the IT systems used by the airplanes. They remain stuck on the airplane — their pilot can’t even obtain a bus to transport his passengers from the airplane to the terminal. CNET reports:
Microsoft suffered a massive, ongoing global IT outage on Friday morning, affecting airports, airlines, banks, hospitals and broadcasters around the world. The outage hit thousands of Windows PCs, which many companies and organizations rely on as part of their critical internet infrastructure. Perhaps most concerning of all, several states across the US have reported that their emergency 911 call centers have been hit.
Microsoft said on X that it was aware of an issue affecting people’s ability to access 365 services late on Thursday. In an update issued around 4 a.m. ET/1 a.m. PT, the company said, “multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress.” The company didn’t immediately respond to request for further comment.
The outage, which also took down the London Stock Exchange, has been linked to a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The company handles the security of many Windows PCs and services around the world. In a statement on Friday morning, Crowdstrike said the issue had been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” the company added.
The last time there was an internet outage this widespread was when a service called Fastly went down in 2021. It’s a reminder of how much of the internet is underpinned by shared infrastructure, which leaves it vulnerable to widespread issues such as this. The share price of many companies took a nose dive following Friday’s outage, but it’s also affected many people on an individual level, from disrupting vacation plans to preventing access to emergency services.
In America, police departments issued warnings that 911 lines were down, most pervasively in Alaska, but also some lines in other states like Minnesota, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio and New Hampshire. Some of these outages are reported on the Down Detector website, with outages seemingly reaching their height around 3 am.
Some TV channels were temporarily knocked off the air by the outage. Sky News is broadcasting from a phone after its studio equipment failed.
In England, medical services were disrupted, such as the National Health Service system for booking appointments and pharmacies, which experienced difficulties with processing payments. Many non-emergency appointments and procedures were canceled.
Airports around the world had problems with their scanning technology, preventing them from processing passengers’ boarding passes. In India and Northern Ireland, boarding passes ended up being written by hand.
In America, the FAA grounded certain flights from American Airlines, United and Delta. Delta Airlines issued a news release saying: “Delta has resumed some flight departures after a vendor technology issue impacted several airlines and businesses around the world. That issue necessitated a pause in Delta’s global flight schedule this morning while it was addressed.” The airline added that additional cancelations and delays would be expected on Friday, but that it had issued a travel waiver, which would allow passengers scheduled to travel today to rebook their flights for little or no cost, depending on date.
