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New York Post
Flights grounded and travelers stranded — including at JFK and LaGuardia — after tech outage cripples banks and other companies around the globe
By Emily Crane, Richard Pollina,
9 hours ago
A failed tech update grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off the air across the world early Friday – with travelers at JFK and LaGuardia Airports among those left stranded by the unprecedented and wide-scale internet disruption.
The global crisis was triggered when US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike deployed a faulty software update to computers running Microsoft Windows overnight, crashing them and leaving the foreboding so-called “blue screen of death.”
Microsoft said the underlying cause of the global outage had been fixed as of early Friday morning — but the impact of cybersecurity outages were continuing to affect some Office 365 apps and services.
Travelers at JFK Airport faced lengthy delays over the outage. @farougoubah/X
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz had earlier stressed that they were “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” — and that a fix was on the way.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said in a statement on X.
But hours after the problem was first detected, chaos continued to mount – and only rippled further.
LaGuardia Airport canceled 30 flights and delayed 10; while JFK Airport travelers faced lengthy delays amid 16 canceled flights.
Major US airline carriers, including Frontier, American, Delta and United, have been impacted by Microsoft’s cloud outages. AP The outages have caused flight cancellations around the globe, including at Gatwick Airport in the UK. @emrane/X
Long lines were also forming at Big Apple airports and across the country as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at the height of summer travel.
The MTA advised New York commuters that customer information systems were “temporarily offline” due to the technical outage, but train and bus services were still running.
The LIRR service wasn’t impacted, but arrival information, station announcements and platform signs were taken offline by the disruption.
Travelers are seen waiting for updates on their flights at LAX following the outages. @jon9198/X
Buffalo Niagara International Airport was also affected by the Microsoft outages. @joemommadawg/X
“This is the first time in recent modern times we’ve seen something like this happen at this scale,” New York City’s chief technology officer, Matthew C Fraser, said during an appearance NBC News.
He added that the fix meant “they’ve stopped the bleeding.”
“New York City takes a lot of precautions in the way that it deploys technology,” Fraser said.
Microsoft said its outage started at about 6 p.m. ET Thursday, and the company was investigating issues with its cloud services. REUTERS
“Fortunately for us, our most critical systems — 911, 311, other things like our traffic management systems and our water management systems — live in a space where this type of impact will not impact the systems,” he continued.
“So as it stands right now our most critical systems are up and running.”
It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off was related to the earlier Microsoft cloud outage. @chengjiastat/X
Travelers at Buffalo Niagara Airport were stranded during the outages, and there was no indication of when their flights would take off. @joemommadawg/X
The effects of the outage and subsequent disruptions were felt widely.
Early on Friday, major US airlines – American Airlines, Delta and United – were among those to ground flights, while other carriers and airports around the world also reported delays and disruptions.
News outlets in Australia — where telecommunications were severely affected — were pushed off air for hours.
Passengers look at a screen displaying delayed flights at Barcelona Airport on July 19, 2024, in Barcelona, Spain. Getty Images
Hospitals and doctor’s offices in the UK had problems with their appointment systems. Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, while Israel said its hospitals and post office operations were disrupted.
And banks and financial services companies from New Zealand to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and reported outages to their payment system or websites and apps.
Some athletes and spectators descending on Paris ahead of the Olympics were also delayed, but Games organizers insisted the disruptions were limited and didn’t affect ticketing or the torch relay.
With Post wires
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