Several major U.S. airlines — including American Airlines, United and Delta — grounded flights early Friday due to a technical issue impacting IT systems, as mass outages disrupted airports, banks, health-care providers, broadcasters and businesses around the world. Some 911 call centers, as well as IT services of the Paris Olympics, were also affected. Microsoft said it was aware of an issue affecting Windows programs running cybersecurity technology from CrowdStrike. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” CrowdStrike’s CEO said early Friday, as some services appeared to be resuming and American Airlines said it was able to “safely re-establish” operations.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote on X early Friday. Earlier, American Airlines said “a technical issue with CrowdStrike” had affected “multiple carriers,” causing it to ground all departing flights.
Businesses around the world reported experiencing issues with Microsoft Windows overnight Thursday into Friday, with users reporting “blue screen of death” (BSOD) errors. At least some resumed functioning shortly afterward.
The issues began at 5:56 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, according to Microsoft. It said the “preliminary root cause” appeared to be “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads” that “caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.” Azure is a Microsoft cloud computing platform.
Microsoft, in a post on X at 6:46 a.m. Eastern time Friday, said that “the underlying cause has been fixed, however, residual impact is continuing to affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services.”
The Paris Olympics organizing committee said Friday that some of its IT services have been impacted by “the global technical issues affecting Microsoft software.” However, it stressed that ticketing systems were unaffected and said that “the preparation of venues is continuing normally.”
