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Massive tech outage affects air traffic, communications worldwide – World

Companies worldwide experienced interruptions amidst an outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing suites on Friday, with flights being grounded, news outlets unable to broadcast information, and operations in brokerage houses being hindered.

Outages have been reported mainly in Australia, the US, the UK, and India, among other countries, affecting institutions ranging from banks, media houses, and stock markets to government branches and airports.

According to Downdetector, a real-time internet outage monitoring website, breakdowns for Microsoft services, including the cloud computing program Azure and office software Microsoft 365, were reported globally within the last 24 hours. In the US, 1,751 outages were reported.

Microsoft said that its outage started at about 6pm Eastern Time (3am Pakistan Standard Time) on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Separately, Microsoft announced it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said on its website. “We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”

IT security firm Crowdstrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.

“Thanks for contacting Crowdstrike support. Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows […] related to the Falcon sensor,” a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company’s technical support.

According to the company, the Falcon Sensor software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the Blue Screen of Death.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised for a global tech failure, vowing to work with all of its customers as they work to get their operations back online.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he told NBC News’ ‘Today’ programme.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz said. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover,” he added, but the company “would make sure every customer is fully recovered”.

Pakistan, a maximum of 25 outages of Microsoft Azure were reported, with only 13 outages of Microsoft 365.

Haroon Baloch, program manager at digital rights organisation Bytes for All told Dawn.com, “I’ve not heard as of now if any Pakistani organisation or airline’s operations are disturbed due to Azure outage.”

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said that the outage also affected consumers of Microsoft in the country.

“The fault forced affected personal computers and servers into a recovery boot loop, preventing proper startup. Some internet services are also affected because of this,” it said.

It added that the fault was identified and isolated with a fix provided by Crowdstrike, as per Crowdstrike’s website. The PTA suggested clients to update the software from their support portal to restore services.

Regarding air traffic operations in the country, a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) spokesperson said in a statement that the national carrier’s flight operations have been “fully restored and are operational.”

“As soon as the [glitch] was reported, the PIA switched to an alternative system of air operations,” the spokesperson said.

He added that one PIA flight at the Lahore airport was slightly delayed, but all other operations are fully normal.

CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. Forty-five per cent of Allegiant aircraft were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23pc of flights, the data showed. The companies did not give details on the number of flights impacted.

Telstra said on Friday. “The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.”

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cybersecurity incident, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.

“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” it said in the statement which did not mention Crowdstrike.

“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.”

A spokesperson for New Zealand’s parliament said its computer systems had also been affected.

State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”, without giving a reason.

In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.

“Our computers, our systems are down all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country,” he said.

A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on Friday.

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