Reports of Crowdstrike crashes on Windows hosts: Airlines, Railways and Airlines are among Those Leashed by the Global Tech Outage
An X user posted a screenshot of an alert from the company Crowdstrike that said the company was aware of “reports 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. A request for comment was not responded to by Crowdstrike.
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. Some news anchors broadcast live online from dark offices, in front of computers showing “blue screens of death.”
The banks and airlines of Australia were among those reported to have suffered outages on the site.
There will be delays in check-in at Berlin Airport due to a technical fault. The flights were suspended until 10 a.m., the news agency reported.
The outage was having a major affect on flights to and from Amsterdam, according to the airport. The outage came on one of the busiest days of the year for the airport, at the start of many people’s summer vacations.
Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled. Passengers in Melbourne queued for more than an hour to check in.
The global IT outage that is causing the disruption is out of our control, according to Ryanair. All passengers are urged to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their departure time.
Airlines, railways and television stations in the United Kingdom were being disrupted by the computer issues. The budget airline Ryanair, train operators TransPennine Express and Govia Thameslink Railway, as well as broadcaster Sky News are among those affected.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
Down Dectector, which tracks user- reported internet outages, recorded growing failures at several companies, including Visa, Amazon and American Airlines.
The disruptions continued hours after the company said it was fixing the issue.
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.
After thousands of flights were canceled on Friday, airlines were playing a big game of catch up. 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.
“My whole trip is more or less ruined,” said Mariah Grant, an American who told NPR she was stuck in London after her flight to New York was significantly delayed because of the outage.
“I think it all speaks to the fact that we are so reliant on technology,” she said, adding she was grateful for the customer service representatives at Gatwick Airport in London who helped reassure her and rebook her flight.
The Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital and CrowdStrike Incident – Report of the Emergency Medical Evacuation Outage on Saturday, April 24
Massachusetts General Brigham, a Boston-based hospital, said it was back to being operational on Saturday after canceling all non-urgent surgeries and other appointments on Friday because of the outage.
“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.
CrowdStrike said it was helping customers who had their screens impacted by the incident, and that 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.