2024-07-21 04:44:31
Crowds of passengers swarmed airports on Friday as dozens of flights were canceled after an update to a system running on Microsoft Windows crash programs worldwide.
On Saturday, officials said the situation had returned to normal at airports across Germany and France, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games that begin on Friday.
Several US airlines and airports across Asia said they had resumed operations, including check-in operations in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and most returned to normal in India, Indonesia and at airports. Singapore Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.
CrowdStrike apologizes
Microsoft estimated Saturday that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected in the global IT crash, adding that the number is less than one percent of all Windows devices.
READ ALSO: Air passengers ‘in limbo’ as global IT crashes flights
“While the share is small, the broader economic and social impacts demonstrate the use of CrowdStrike by companies that run a variety of critical services,” he said.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Wednesday, affecting Windows users running its CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.
In a blog post Saturday, CrowdStrike said it had released an update Wednesday night that caused a system crash and the infamous “blue screen of death” fatal error message.
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CrowdStrike said it had fixed the problem, and the head of the company, George Kurtz, told the US news channel CNBC that he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person involved”.
The company also said it may take a few days for things to return to normal.
Britain’s National Health Service was hit by the crash on Friday, preventing doctors from accessing patient records and appointments.
“Many of the systems… are coming back online in many areas, however they are still running more slowly than usual”, an NHS spokesman said, warning of disruption continuing into next week.
READ MORE: A global IT glitch begins to cause travel chaos in Spain
Media outlets were also hit, with Britain’s Sky News saying a glitch had ended news broadcasts on Friday morning. Australia’s ABC also reported serious problems.
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Authorities in Australia, Britain and Germany warned of an increase in scams and privacy attempts following the outage, with people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, some mobile phone transmissions were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.
“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of the British Institute of Science and Technology. Britain’s Engineering and Technology said, adding that the last event close to the same scale was in 2017.
Flight chaos
While some airports have stopped all flights, in others airline workers have started manual checks for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travelers.
Thousands of US planes have been grounded, although airlines later said they were still reorganizing their operations and working through the backlog.
A US administration official said on Friday that “our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although there are some delays”.
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India’s largest airline Indigo said on Saturday that operations had been “settled”, adding in a statement on X that the process of resuming normal operations would “extend to the weekend”.
Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online and was “working around the clock towards restoring its flight control systems”.
Chinese state media said Beijing airports were not affected.
‘The Common Thing’
Companies are laying down their plans and trying to estimate the damage, even as employees try to suppress the panic by judging the unfair profit.
According to Saturday’s CrowdStrike blog, the issue “is not the result of or related to a cyberattack”.
Although CrowdStrike has rolled out a fix, many experts question the simplicity of such a process.
“While experienced users can implement the task, expecting millions to do so is unrealistic,” said Oli Buckley, a professor at Britain’s Loughborough University.
Other experts say the incident should prompt a widespread review of how dependent societies are on the hands of technology companies.
“We need to know that such software can be a common cause of failure for several systems at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor at York University in England.
Infrastructure should be designed “to be resilient against such common cause problems,” he added.
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