CNN
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Services are gradually being restored but the “biggest IT outage in history” has hobbled sectors around the world, left thousands of passengers stranded in airports, crippled emergency communications services and left blood donation centres without vital supplies, causing delays for a second day in a row.
Faulty software updates for the Microsoft Windows operating system issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused outages or disrupted services at airlines, businesses, government agencies, health and emergency services, banks, schools and universities around the world, experts told CNN.
CrowdStrike’s CEO said a fix had been distributed, but experts said it would be a lengthy process to get the system back to normal.
The outage affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices, less than 1% of all Windows machines, according to a Microsoft blog post on Saturday. “While a small percentage, the widespread economic and societal impact reflects the use of CrowdStrike by companies that run many critical services,” Microsoft said.
As of Saturday afternoon, more than 2,300 flights to, from and within the United States had been canceled and more than 6,000 were delayed, according to tracking website FlightAware.
More than 3,000 flights were canceled and more than 11,000 were delayed on Friday, according to FlightAware.com.
Major airlines around the world have announced that services are being restored.
United Airlines said in a statement that most of its systems had been restored from Friday’s outage.
United Airlines said in a statement that “most of our systems have recovered from a global third-party software outage, but some operational disruptions, including flight delays or cancellations, may continue.”
Delta Air Lines said in an update Saturday morning that it was “continuing to restore operations” after suspending operations on Friday due to an outage. Still, more than 600 Delta flights were canceled Saturday.
“Additional cancellations are expected as some of Delta’s technology continues to recover from a vendor-issued issue Friday morning,” the update said.
Jetstar Japan, Hong Kong Express Airways and Cebu Pacific Air also announced on Saturday that operations were gradually being restored.
Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the confusion by promoting fake websites packed with malicious software designed to put unsuspecting victims at risk, according to warnings from the U.S. government and several cybersecurity experts.
Former McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt told CNN that a group of private sector and government agencies worked through the night to “identify the threat” and find a solution to the global outage. The meetings also included the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other private and government agencies.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers on Friday for the outage and said the company was working with those affected.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and deeply apologize for any inconvenience and trouble caused,” Kurtz posted on X. “We are working with all affected customers to get our systems back up and running so we can provide the service you expect.”
However, this is easier said than done: manually rebooting individual systems takes time, and some customers don’t have the expertise, which means businesses are slower to recover from outages.
Frustrated passengers lined up at airports because of flight cancellations and delays, some missing funerals, birthdays and other important milestones. Long lines of passengers waited for assistance at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Saturday as many flights remained canceled or delayed.
“We were supposed to be going to California for my mother’s wedding,” Richard Whitfield, of Pasco County, Florida, told CNN’s Isabel Rosales on Saturday. Whitfield and his partner, Jonathan Shade, left Tampa on Thursday but missed their connecting flight in Atlanta due to bad weather, which delayed the landing and forced the plane to refuel in Tallahassee.
After multiple delays to their rescheduled flight on Friday, the couple decided to cancel their trip and fly home, but a flight back to Tampa wasn’t available Friday night, so they spent a second night in an airport hotel. They weren’t able to get vouchers from Delta for either stay.
“[Richard]was on hold for 24 hours,” Shade told CNN. “When he finally got his number it was 2,001.”
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Two hours later, Richards was 2,300th in Delta’s virtual customer service queue, Shade said. Delta reported the most cancellations, with more than 850 Delta and Delta Connection flights unable to depart.
“If I can’t fly, I’ll try to drive. If I can’t drive, I’ll spend another night in a hotel and see what happens,” Shade said.
Shade and Whitfield said the last they checked, the cost of a rental car to get back to Tampa was $600. Amtrak charges $1,000 for a one-way ticket to Tampa, he added.
Whitfield told CNN that the chain of events had an impact on him: “For me, this was the domino effect it had on humanity and all the things we need to survive: food, sleep, water, shelter,” he said.
Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images
A traveler looks at a screen displaying delayed and canceled flights at Delta Airlines Terminal 2 at Los Angeles Airport on Friday.
After 48 hours in Atlanta, they found a flight back to Tampa for Saturday evening, but they’re hoping the flight isn’t delayed or canceled. For now, Shade and Whitfield say all the couple can do is wait and “have a good drink.”
In addition to issues at airports, the outages have also caused delays at hotels and car rental companies, with major hotel chains including Marriott International and some Hilton properties affected by both slower payment processing and check-in procedures.
Americans who weren’t traveling also felt the effects of the outages in many aspects of daily life, including when trying to call 911 during emergencies in some areas, getting or renewing a driver’s license, or sending or receiving packages.
There were reports that 911 systems in various states, including Alaska, and cities, including Phoenix, were down for hours but then restored.
Driver license offices in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia closed or limited service.
Some hospitals have had to cancel appointments and surgeries.
While most hospitals stayed open to handle emergency medical needs, some canceled patient appointments and surgeries because they couldn’t access electronic medical records or order tests or prescriptions.
Hospital staff scrambled to provide patients with the care they needed without the technology they relied on.
Kim Brown, a labor and delivery nurse at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Jose, California, was nearing the end of her shift Thursday night when the hospital’s computer system, which she relies on to care for women and their babies during labor, went down.
“All of our babies have little plastic tags that sound an alarm if they get too close to an exit or an elevator, and it’s worked,” Brown said. “It was scary because there was no information. It was just like, ‘Oh no, they’re all out now.'”
As the power outage could pose a safety risk to newborns, the hospital has requested that security guards be posted near the elevators to ensure the safety of newborns.
Laura Topete, a nurse practitioner in the postpartum care unit at Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, said she tried to get painkillers for women in pain after giving birth but was stumped because she couldn’t access doctor’s orders for what medications to prescribe.
“Patients were in pain for longer than they needed to be,” Topete said.
Epic Systems Inc., which makes electronic medical records systems widely used by hospitals and clinics, said on Friday that its cloud-based platform, Nebula, was affected by an overnight outage and that some services, including telehealth visits, were unavailable during the outage. Veradigm Inc., another electronic medical records company, also said its systems were affected by the CrowdStrike outage.
A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said the department is working with federal, state, local and private sector partners “to assess the impact of the CrowdStrike outage on patient care and HHS systems, services, and operations.”
In addition to hospitals, blood donation centers also faced challenges from flight delays and changed how they transport blood. The New York Blood Center, which supplies about 200 hospitals in the Northeast, launched emergency drives to distribute blood it had collected. And Blood Assurance said flight problems had jeopardized plans to transport at least 20 million platelets, the disc-shaped fragments that help blood clot.
The government was at a standstill.
The global technology outage affected the entire US, leaving countless government agencies waiting for services to return to normal.
The mayor of Portland, Oregon, has declared a state of emergency following the ongoing power outage, which Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a news release affected servers in the city’s data center, employee computers and single sign-on to cloud services.
In Southern California, the disruptions caused connectivity issues at Los Angeles County Superior Court and temporarily limited inmate capacity at San Diego County jails, authorities said.
Meanwhile, some polling places in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the fourth-most populous county in the US and home to Phoenix, lost power as early voting continued in the state’s primary election, according to the elections department, according to its website.
The Social Security Administration closed several local offices on Friday after the outage caused numerous service outages. The agency said in a statement that wait times at its 800-number nationwide were expected to be longer and that some online services may be unavailable.