Software engineers are scrambling to contain a worldwide software outage that is disrupting nearly all aspects of modern life around the world. The global outage is affecting internet services, airlines, banks and hospitals.
The outage appears to be centered around Microsoft’s services. The company issued a statement Friday morning saying that some of its services have “improvement” and that it expects that trend to continue as the company takes steps to mitigate the problem.
Technology experts say that the outage does not appear to be caused by a cybersecurity attack. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, said one of its updates may have caused the problem, affecting Microsoft Windows devices.
"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
Update
Airline impact
While a wide range of businesses are affected, banks and airlines were among the first to feel the impact. United, Delta and American grounded flights worldwide. By 7:30 a.m. Eastern Time, American Airlines reported its systems were back up.
Delta Airlines issued a statement Friday morning saying some flights had resumed but said it expects some delays and cancellations throughout the day.
“Delta has issued a travel waiver for all customers who have booked flights departing Friday, July 19,” the company said in a statement. “It allows customers to manage their own travel changes via delta.com and the Fly Delta app.”
Delta said the fare difference for customers will be waived when rebooked travel occurs on or before July 24, in the same cabin of service as originally booked. If travel is rebooked after July 24, any difference in fare between the original ticket and the new ticket will be collected at the time of booking.
Update
American Airlines issued a statement saying it too had been able to re-establish operations, but warned travelers to expect delays and cancellations as a result.
“American will notify customers whose flight plans are affected via the American Airlines app or text message,” the company said. “Please continue to check the American Airlines app or aa.com for the latest on flight statuses.”
To provide additional flexibility, American said it has issued a travel alert, allowing customers whose travel plans are affected by this issue to rebook without fees, cancel or receive a refund. Visit aa.com/travelalerts for details.
How it happened
Dominic Chorafakis, a cybersecurity expert at Akouto, says the trigger for the outage appears to be software from CrowdStrike called Falcon. Falcon is an application that provides cybersecurity features for computers including anti-virus and intrusion detection, among other things.
“According to reports from Microsoft, customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform started to experience issues around 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time on July 18th,” Chorafakis told ConsumerAffairs. “Within about three hours, Microsoft provided an update that the underlying cause of the outage was a “configuration change” to some of their computer systems that power the Azure cloud services, causing these systems to lose connectivity between them and reboot.”
After uncovering the underlying issue, Chorafakis said Microsoft was able to restore services running in Azure within five to six hours. But the problem is that the faulty software update from CrowdStrike didn’t only impact Microsoft, many companies using Falcon experienced outages themselves.
Also, it is up to the IT department of each company to get their systems back in service, potentially working with CrowdStrike support, so it is impossible to put a timeline on when each individual company will be fully operational.
“The fix does appear to be relatively simple so the issue should not persist for too long,” Chorafakis said.