Microsoft IT outage linked to cyber security firm Crowdstrike hits airlines, railways, NHS and media outlets globally – live news

CrowdStrike president George Kurtz said the problem was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”.

He wrote on X:

Holidaymakers can’t claim compensation from airline

Hilary Osborne

UK and EU holidaymakers who have their flights delayed because of the IT outage are likely to find that they cannot claim compensation from their airline because the problem is out of its control, writes our consumer & Money editor Hilary Osborne.

EU rules, adopted by the UK, say that passengers can get compensation of up to £520 if their flight is cancelled or delayed by more than three hours – but not when the cause is an “extraordinary circumstance.”

Airlines are likely to argue that the outage counts as such – and some are already stressing in communications that the problems are not their fault.

Passengers who have travel insurance might be able to make a claim on their policy – but it will depend on the terms and conditions of the policy they have bought.

Whitehall crisis officials are co-ordinating the response to the major IT outage, cabinet minister Pat McFadden has said.

In a post on X, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said:

Cobra is the committee tasked with handling matters of national emergency or major disruption.

The UK government has been urged to convene a Cobra meeting to respond to the major IT outage hitting airlines, train companies and banks.

In the UK, train companies are reporting delays, GP surgeries are unable to book appointments or access patient records and Sky News was knocked off air but is now back on air. Restaurants in parliament appear to be affected too, with catering services only accepting cash payments.

The Liberal Democrats demanded ministers co-ordinate an urgent response. The party’s Cabinet Office spokesperson Christine Jardine said:

The government must call an urgent Cobra meeting to address the chaos being caused by these IT outages across the country. The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised.

Getting critical infrastructure up and running again must be priority number one. The National Cyber Security Centre should also be working with small businesses and other organisations to help them deal with the outage.

This once again lays bare the need to improve our digital infrastructure and truly modernise our economy in order to prevent the incidents from happening again.

Some UK retailers have been forced to switch to cash only because of the global IT outage.

Waterstones in Falkirk said on X:

Waitrose and Morrisons are also affected, according to shoppers and other reports.

Wetherspoons cannot take card payments, according to social media reports.

Ruth Michaelson

The Israeli health ministry said “the global malfunction,” has affected 16 hospitals across the country. Patients are not affected, they said, as the hospital has switched to using analogue or other systems without issue.

The ministry instructed the Israeli ambulance service, the Magen David Adom, to evacuate patients to hospital facilities unaffected by the malfunctioning computer systems. So far, they said ambulance services have not been affected by the issue, but advised anyone looking to call an ambulance to try an alternate number for the service if problems occur on the standard line.

In the Emirates, the Dubai International Airport, a major transit hub, said it has resumed normal operations after a system outage that had affected check-in procedures for some airlines, per Reuters.

One passenger with the Indian domestic airline IndiGo vented their frustrations on social media at being stuck in long queues at check in.

Stuck at Dubai airport for over an hour now. Check-in servers down, no movement in sight. Frustrating start to travel.

Some children have been told to stay off school on the last day of term.

Castleford Academy in west Yorkshire said it is closed today.

Whitecross Hereford High School in Herefordshire said its school information management system is down due to the tech outage and that parents should phone or email if their child is sick.

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.

St Peter’s Medical Centre in Brighton, which uses SystmOne rather than Emis, is operating normally, my colleague Charlotte Naughton has pointed out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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:

Eurowings, which is part of Germany’s Lufthansa group, said: