Companies around the globe — from airlines and hospitals to banks and even courthouses — had operations grounded or disrupted by what was supposed to be an uneventful software update pushed out early Friday by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by some of the largest corporate and government agencies in the world.
“This was not a cyberattack,” CrowdStrike said in a statement. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
The CrowdStrike issue came on the heels of a widespread outage involving Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, on Thursday night. Microsoft said the issues were unrelated. The CrowdStrike update affected customers running a version of the Windows operating system.
NBC News called the outage “arguably the largest global information technology outage in history.” At least five U.S. airlines — American Airlines, Allegiant Air, Delta, Spirit and United — issued ground stops on Friday, leaving airports around the world with crowded terminals and endless customer service lines. (Some flights have resumed.) Hospitals that experienced issues with their computer systems had to cancel non-urgent surgeries. In several states, 911 emergency lines were down.
Downdetector, a website that employs user reports and online indicators to report technical outages, detected user issues at dozens of U.S. companies. NerdWallet was not directly affected by the outage.
As of 1 p.m. ET, Downdetector was still reporting spikes in potential user issues at these companies:
Banks and financial services
Telecommunications, cable and wireless
Other consumer services
(Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
