London/Washington, July 19 (UNI) A major worldwide tech disruption grounded flights, hit services in banks, hospitals and media outlets and left a huge number of businesses grappling with IT issues on Friday.
The mass IT outage crippled flight operations in major international airports including in India, Hong Kong, the UK, Australia and the US.
Aviation analytics company Cirium said 1390 of the around 110,000 commercial flights scheduled across the world have been cancelled, according to a BBC report.
Downdetector, a cyber outage tracking website said Australian banking and telecoms institutions like ANZ, Westpac, Visa, and Optus were also hit.
Other businesses affected included Australian supermarket chains, the country state police, its national broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corporation and New Zealand banks.
Sky News, one of the UK’s major news broadcasters, went off the air, BBC reported.
In the UK, booking systems used by doctors as also the National Health Service was impacted, according to posts by several medical officials on X.
Microsoft Windows users worldwide were seeing a blue screen issue on their laptops which made their systems restart or shut down automatically.
“The underlying cause has been fixed, however, residual impact is continuing to affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re conducting additional mitigations to provide relief,” Microsoft said in a post on X.
Experts told CNN the outage was apparently caused in parts by a software update issued by major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the defect causing IT disruption globally has been identified and a fix deployed. He said it was neither a security incident not a cyber attack.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said.
