Airports, Banks and Stock Exchanges Affected: Large-Scale IT Outage Occurred Around the World

A series of technical failures disrupted the work of airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange on Friday after Microsoft reported interruptions in its online services.

Bloomberg writes about it.

‘McDonald's Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and LSE Group were among the largest companies to report a variety of problems. They are the most prominent of a slew of corporations from Japan to India to the United States that have reported disruptions in their operations. It was unclear what caused the problems, which coincided with Microsoft's outage.

At least some of the problems are related to cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Australian company AGL Energy Ltd. reported in a post on X that it is currently experiencing system problems due to a failure in CrowdStrike's work,’ the agency writes.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was looking into the situation.

The first failures appeared in the US late on Thursday night, due to malfunctions in Microsoft services, including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, part of Frontier Group Holdings Inc. suspended flights for more than two hours. The airline cancelled a nationwide pause in departures and began the process of resuming flights at 23:00 New York time.

The LSE Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said it is facing a global technical problem that is preventing it from publishing news. In Asia, Japanese users began reporting outages of services, including Microsoft 365, the company's online office software, in the afternoon. Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports returned to manual check-in.

The latest outage comes just after Microsoft said it had resolved the problem of Azure cloud services outages. Earlier, the company's status pages reported that Azure and Microsoft 365 had been experiencing problems for several hours.

According to the BBC, major banks, media and airlines reported outages.

The US state of Alaska warned that its emergency services were affected, while several airlines in the country suspended their flights around the world.

‘The British TV channel Sky News has stopped broadcasting completely, and in Australia, which has been particularly hard hit, broadcasters have experienced interruptions in their operations due to malfunctions in broadcasting systems. Supermarkets in both countries were also out of service.

An official Microsoft 365 service update posted on the X website earlier in the day said that ‘we are investigating an issue that is affecting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.’

However, a Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC on Friday that ‘most services had been restored’ a few hours earlier.

A spokesperson for Australia's Home Affairs Minister said the outage was likely due to a problem at global cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, while the country's cybersecurity watchdog said there was no information to suggest it was an attack.

‘According to our current information, this outage is due to a technical issue with a third-party software platform used by the affected companies,’ the statement said.

Delta and American Airlines, which are based in the United States, have announced a ‘global shutdown’ of all their flights. And in Australia, Virgin Australia and Jetstar were also forced to delay or cancel flights.

Australian telecommunications company Telstra said that its Triple-0 call centres - the main contact centre in Australia - were not affected, but that it was working with other government emergency services to put backup processes in place.

Social media users have reported queues at Australian stores such as Woolworths, payment system failures, and problems accessing financial institutions such as the National Australia Bank.

CrowdStrike confirmed that computers with its software installed are experiencing problems with the Windows operating system suddenly shutting down.

Turkish Airlines and Indian SpiceJet also reported problems with ticket booking and check-in. Bloomberg writes that the failure ‘caused chaos’ at several airports in Australia. According to the agency, check-in was disrupted at Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth airports, and some flights were delayed. Similar problems were reported at airports in Germany, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands.

In the UK, Govia Thameslink Railway, the largest British railway company, also reported technical failures.