US transportation, police and hospital systems stricken by global CrowdStrike IT outage

Thousands of air passengers were stranded across the US on Friday morning and police and hospital systems were left struggling as a global IT outage grounded major domestic airlines and struck rail services, shipping and police emergency systems, as well as some hospital functions.

Technology systems using both Microsoft’s Windows and CrowdStrike cybersecurity software were hit by the outage, after a CrowdStrike update installed faulty software in computers running Windows.

The problem left large numbers of workers around the world facing an error screen on computers, as experts began predicting it could turn out to be the largest-scale IT failure in history.

Alongside stranded travelers, the outage closed US courts, stopped customers at TD Bank, the US’s 10th largest bank, from accessing their accounts, and caused multiple problems for hospitals, police, and firefighters. Early on Friday morning, the San Francisco fire department reported 20 simultaneous false fire alarms that were probably caused by the issue.

The outage also affected emergency services, including law enforcement. In Alaska, both 911 emergency and non-emergency call centers stopped working correctly across the state, and state troopers were forced to put out notices encouraging people to use manual phone lines.

Emergency call lines were also reportedly impaired in a number of other states, including Arizona, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.

CrowdStrike said it had since resolved the update-related issue, though IT administrators may need some time to implement the fix.

In an interview with the Today show on Friday morning, CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, said the company was “deeply sorry for the impact we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this”. Kurtz emphasized that the outage was caused by a bug in a software update, not a cyber-attack.

“We’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them,” Kurtz said.

The White House told the press that Joe Biden had been briefed on the outage. “His team is engaged across the interagency to get sector by sector updates throughout the day and is standing by to provide assistance as needed,” it said in a statement.

In the US, airports along the east coast from Miami to Boston were engulfed in chaos amid serious flight disruptions caused by the Microsoft Windows outage, which centered on Microsoft’s 365 applications.

At Denver international airport in Colorado, passengers turning up expecting to catch flights were greeted with flashing blue error messages on information screens.

According to the data tracker FlightAware, 1,290 flights had been cancelled within, into or out of the US and a further 2,905 delayed by 9am ET on Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that at least five carriers – American, United, Delta, Allegiant Air and Spirit – had issued ground stops, holding planes at airports. Smaller airlines including Frontier and SunCountry also reported outages in the early hours.

In a statement, the FAA said it was “closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at US airlines. Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved.”

Airports along the east coast and midwest appeared to bear the brunt of the chaos, with New York City and the Chicago region affected especially hard. In Boston’s Logan international airport, passengers waited in check-in lines for Spirit Airlines as long as a football field.

American Airlines said that at 5am ET it managed to “safely re-establish our operation” and call off the ground stop. But it was likely that disruptions would continue for several hours, given the knock-on effects of stopping flights.

The outage caused havoc for Americans attempting to return to the US as well as domestic passengers. Patricia Sweeney told NBC News of her dismay when her American Airlines flight home from Tokyo to New York was cancelled. She described what happened when another American flight next to her gate was also cancelled: “You could just hear a roar of passengers – people are not happy,” she said.

According to Microsoft, the massive outage started at about 6pm ET on Thursday, with the first impact being felt in the central US region, and then spreading to the coasts. The initial disruption appears to have been suffered by customers using Azure services, a cloud computing platform used to manage applications.

In New York state, the Buffalo-based Kaleida Health network, which runs five hospitals in the region, reported problems with its systems overnight while saying it was getting services up and running again but, according to local media, adding: “We are encouraging all staff – as well as patients – to report as scheduled.”

At Mass General Brigham hospitals in Boston, all appointments classified non-urgent were cancelled on Friday as a result of the outage. The hospital group said that many of its systems had been affected, though its emergency services and urgent care facilities were being kept open.

Other US health groups also cancelled all non-emergency appointments including surgeries. Mount Nittany Health in Pennsylvania said it had made this exceptional move because it was “experiencing significant disruptions across our entire health system”.

As the crisis deepened across the US, other forms of transportation were hit. In New Jersey, two major shipping terminals, APM Terminals and Maher Terminals in Port Newark, delayed opening on Friday because of the outage.

In Washington DC, the website of the underground Metro commuter train system in the US capital remained down for several hours, but the Metro service said that its stations opened on time and trains and buses were operating as scheduled on Friday.

The US secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, said that the department was monitoring events, especially at the airlines, closely. He said he would hold all airlines “to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers”.