Banks, airlines, railways and media outlets hit by global outage linked to Windows PCs
Businesses including banks, airlines, railways, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets have been taken offline after blue screen of death error screens were seen on Windows workstations across the globe.
Users on the subreddit for cyber security firm Crowdstrike reported issues in India, the United States and New Zealand.
Britain’s biggest train company has warned passengers to expect disruption due to “widespread IT issues”.
Govia Thameslink Railway – parent company of Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern – issued an alert on its social media channels.
⚠️ We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network. Our IT teams are actively investigating to determine the root cause of the problem.
We are unable to access driver diagrams at certain locations, leading to potential short-notice cancellations,…
— Southern (@SouthernRailUK) July 19, 2024
The NHS booking system used by doctors in England is offline, medical officials said on X.
Sky News in the UK reported being off air this morning, with Sky News sports presenter Jacquie Beltrao posting on X: “We’re obviously not on air – we’re trying.” Sky News is still down, according to a message on its website.
The London Stock Exchange is also facing technical issues.
Key events
NHS England: Outage causing disruption in most GP practices but no impact on 999
The IT outage is “causing disruption in the majority of GP practices” in
England but there is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, NHS
England said.
The NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with a GP appointment and patient record system.
If you have an appointment please do attend unless you are told otherwise. If you need help use 111 online or by phone and in an emergency call 999.
— NHS England (@NHSEngland) July 19, 2024
Birmingham Airport said the majority of flights are operating normally but passengers are facing some delays at check-in.
On X, formerly Twitter, the airport posted:
The majority of flights are operating as normal. However, some check ins are experiencing delays which are being processed by colleagues. For those that have checked in online previously are unaffected.
This is clearly a rapidly evolving situation. Customers should follow the advice from airlines and we will continue to update passengers throughout the day.
A spokeswoman for easyJet, the UK’s biggest airline by passenger numbers, advised customers travelling from Spanish airports to arrive three hours before their flight due to the IT outage. She said:
EasyJet’s IT systems have not been directly affected by the Microsoft systems issues this morning, however we are aware that some airports’ systems have been impacted across Europe.
This has led to some disruption to flights this morning and we expect some further potential impact to flights today.
Customers should expect longer than usual airport queues and we are advising customers travelling from Spanish airports to arrive three hours before their flight. We advise customers due to travel with us today to continue to check the latest updates on their flight on easyJet’s Flight Tracker before making their way to the airport. Although outside of our control, we are sorry for any inconvenience caused.
Expert reaction to mass global IT outage
Here is more reaction from experts to the massive global IT outage:
Shumi Akhtar, associate professor at the University of Sydney, said:
Today’s technology outage — an unprecedented global crisis— sparked off in the USA, is now ominously rippling across the globe. This sudden, severe disruption halts everyday activities and starkly exposes the fragility of our heavily digitised world. From banking to healthcare, education to government, no sector remains untouched, highlighting an urgent need for a worldwide strategic overhaul of our critical infrastructures. This crisis calls for immediate collaborative action to enhance resilience through robust safeguards and fail-safes, especially in life-critical networks.
As a result of this outage, at least three critical sectors could be affected significantly.
In the medical industry, a technology outage can result in the loss of access to electronic medical records, critical patient data, and communication systems essential for patient care. This could delay surgeries, medication administration, and emergency responses, potentially endangering lives.
In the banking sector, an outage can cripple financial transactions, including ATM withdrawals, online banking, and payment processing. This disruption can lead to significant financial losses for consumers and institutions, and undermine public trust in the financial system
For the airline industry, technology outages can ground flights, disrupt ticketing and check-in processes, and affect air traffic control. This can lead to massive delays, financial losses, and compromise passenger safety and security. Each of these scenarios highlights the catastrophic potential of technology failures across critical industries.
Prof John McDermid of the Institute for Safe Autonomy at the University of York said:
Security software is intended to protect computers from attack, e.g. by malware. and to provide this protection it has a lot of power to control the host PC. Such software is pervasive – on many if not all machines of a particular type – so a fault in the security software can bring down many computers at once. This appears to be what is behind the widespread outage of Windows-10 based PCs around the world, with knock-on effects on air travel, banking, etc.
We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of failure for multiple systems at the same time, and we need to design infrastructure to be resilient against such common cause problems, e.g. through use of diversity, that is not relying on a single make of computer system and/or software.
Dr Harjinder Lallie, cyber security expert at the University of Warwick, said:
The worldwide IT outage experienced this morning is unprecedented in the range and scale of systems it has impacted. Although we cannot speculate on the cause of this outage just yet, it appears that this might be a server error emanating from one server supplier.
This IT ‘catastrophe’ highlights the need for greater resilience, a greater focus on backup systems, and possibly even a need to rethink whether we are using the most resilient operating systems for such critical systems.
A traveller at Gatwick Airport queuing for over three-and-a-half hours has described the scene at the travel hub as “bedlam” with staff now handing out water to those stranded, PA reported.
Dean Seddon started queuing at 6am to check in for a trip with his social media training company to Miami, Florida, ahead of their scheduled departure at 10am with Norse Atlantic Airways.
There are just people everywhere, there must be 400 people in this queue for the check in desk I’m at… it’s just bedlam,” the 42-year-old from Plymouth told the PA news agency.
It’s one of those things where you kind of know we’re not going to fly, but you don’t want to leave because you don’t know.
[Staff are] doing the best they can but they don’t actually know when it’s going to be fixed, so it is frustrating, but you kind of feel for the staff as well.
Seddon said there had been some people getting “agitated” in the queue but overall travellers had remained calm.
UK pharmacies hit by IT outage
The UK’s National Pharmacy Association confirmed the IT outage is disrupting community pharmacies.
A spokesperson said:
We’re aware that due to global IT outages that services in community pharmacies, including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries, are disrupted today.
We urge patients to be patient whilst visiting their pharmacy. We’re urgently raising this issue with the NHS England.
Ilkka Turunen, of the software supply chain management firm Sonatype, explains what’s going on with the Microsoft Windows outage.
The widespread outages across the world affecting Microsoft Windows are due to a botched update to a piece of software called Crowdstrike, a well-regarded malware and endpoint protection tool often used by enterprises and many companies across the world.
In terms of technical details, the update causes a BSOD loop on any Windows machine essentially making it boot and crash on an infinite loop. Making it worse is the fact that there are a significant number of Windows machines that the update was auto-installed on overnight. There are workarounds that customers of theirs will apply, but it seems to be very manual.
It’s definitely a supply chain style incident – what it shows is that one popular vendor botching an update can have a huge impact on its customers and how far a single well-orchestrated update can spread in a single night. It’s not yet clear if the contents were due to malicious reasons, but it shows how quickly targeted attacks on popular vendors could spread.
Lili Bayer
Swiss International Air Lines is also affected.
The Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air said it is “facing extreme technical challenges” and advised “customers to arrive at the airport at least 3 hours prior to their flight today.”
Airports in Germany hit by outage at start of school holidays
Deborah Cole
Airports in Germany have also been hit by the outages, causing major delays at the start of school holidays for many regions.
Air traffic at Berlin’s BER came to a complete halt in the early morning hours of Friday, according to public broadcaster RBB due to a server breakdown that triggered several emergency systems to kick in.
The daily Tagesspiegel said several in-bound flights could not land in Berlin and had to return to the airport of origin or be redirected.
An airport spokesman said he expected takeoffs and landings to resume in the late morning.
A reporter for news agency DPA said long queues had formed at Terminal 1, particularly at check-in counters.
A spokeswoman for Hamburg’s international airport said that four carriers had been affected by outages: Eurowings, Ryanair, Vueling and Turkish Airlines, requiring tickets and boarding passes to be issued by hand.
The larger hubs of Frankfurt and Zurich reported no IT problems of their own but saw disruptions due to the knock-on effect from other facilities.
The Schleswig-Holstein university hospital in the north of the country cancelled all planned operations in Kiel and Lübeck due to the disruptions, according to a statement on its website.
Mark Lloyd, business unit manager at IT services firm Axians UK, said:
IT outages are being reported across the world due to a rogue Crowdstrike update. So far the outage has affected airports, banks, railways and the media, with Sky News being left unable to broadcast [earlier] this morning.
This outage is a stark reminder of how dependent the world is on cloud services. From productivity tools to critical infrastructure, a large chunk of technology runs on cloud platforms. This outage showcases the immense power and reach these services hold.
Even the biggest tech giants are not immune to disruptions, and the need for robust redundancy and disaster recovery plans across the board are more critical than ever in this day and age.
It’s important to remember in a time of disruption like this, we’re all on the same team, fighting the same bad guys.
At this stage, government officials are indicating they are not treating this as a cyber attack from hostile states or criminals, reports Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor.
Cyber security expert says outage may be caused by ‘bug to security update’
Cyber security expert Dan Card, from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, said people “should remain calm” while businesses respond to the global IT outage, which may have been caused by a “bug to a regular security update”.
It looks like a bug to a regular security update, rather than any form of ‘mega cyber attack’, but this is still causing worldwide challenges and is likely to require a large number of people to take manual remedial steps.
Companies should make sure their IT teams are well supported as it could be a difficult and highly stressful weekend for them as they help customers.
People often forget the people that are running around fixing things.
‘World grinding to a halt’ but stock markets functioning as normal
“The world grinding to a halt because of a global IT meltdown shows the dark side to technology and that relying on computers doesn’t always make life easier,” says Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at the stockbroker AJ Bell.
Countless industries, from airlines and trains to banks and media, face disruption to earnings if they cannot do their job. Workers cannot get from A to B and that will have a knock-on effect for industries across the board if staff aren’t there to perform important functions or systems are offline.
The severity of the problem boils down to how long it lasts. A few hours’ disruption is unhelpful but not a catastrophe. Prolonged disruption is another matter, potentially causing damage to companies and economies.
There is chatter that cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike ran an update which didn’t work on Microsoft’s operating system and that caused systems to fall over. Given we don’t know the full details, it’s too early for investors to work out the financial or reputational impact to these businesses.
Stock markets continued to function as normal despite corporate news feeds and information terminals being impacted by the tech outage. Futures prices imply a small pullback when Wall Street opens later today, but so far investors have not shown any panic. Whether that remains the case as the day goes on is another matter.
Lili Bayer
The global IT outage comes at a time when many people are heading off on their summer holidays.
The Dutch airline KLM said on X:
KLM and other airlines and airports have been affected by a global computer outage, making flight handling impossible. We realise that this is very inconvenient for our customers and staff, particularly in the midst of the summer holiday season. We’re working hard to resolve the… pic.twitter.com/O4gm7u0DIW
— KLM (@KLM) July 19, 2024
Eurowings, which is part of Germany’s Lufthansa group, said:
Due to an IT malfunction, there are currently disruptions in global air traffic. The check-in and boarding processes are impaired and online check-in is not possible. There may be delays and flight cancellations. Please check your flight status: https://t.co/QNYRbGnaMJ
— Eurowings (@eurowings) July 19, 2024