Mayor Adams warns of ongoing effects of global outage, but critical systems functioning as normal

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What to know

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• A global network outage disrupted some services around New York and New Jersey early Friday morning.
• MTA customer information systems — countdown clocks and the MTA app — were affected by the outage but subways, buses and trains are running normally.
• JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Airports all cautioned travelers to check with their individual carriers and not to head to the airport unless their flight status was confirmed.
• 911, 311 and all traffic management services are functioning as normal.

A global network outage disrupted some services around New York and New Jersey early Friday morning, according to reports from multiple agencies, but most critical systems were not affected, officials said.

The problems seem to have stemmed from an update to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity system used by Microsoft, that crashed every computer system that used it, according to Matthew Fraser, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer. The biggest impact was to banks, businesses and flights at regional airports — but train, traffic and emergency response systems were all functioning, officials said.

Still, Mayor Eric Adams warned New Yorkers in a press conference Friday morning that ancillary effects could cause some agita to New Yorkers.

“We expect to continue to see cascading effects of the outage throughout the day,” he said.

Fraser, in an interview Friday morning with WNYC, said the update did not affect the city’s 911, 311 or traffic light systems, which run on separate operational networks to shield them form these kinds of outages.

“The good news is, everything that’s critical, the critical services across the city everything from 911, 311, traffic management, water management — everything else in between that’s most critical – those systems are not impacted,” Fraser said. “We’re taking a catalog right now of everything that received that update, and we’re trying to put together a list of things that are impacted.”

But any computer systems that do use the software experienced “the blue screen of death,” Fraser said. “That basically means that the system went under a critical failure and it didn’t know how to recover.”

Online services like banking and managing flight bookings were down, and airlines like American and Delta asked the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a global ground stop on all flights.

JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Airports all cautioned travelers to check with their individual carriers and not to head to the airport unless their flight status was confirmed. The Port Authority itself was not affected by the outage.

The MTA said only their customer information systems were affected – such as train arrival information, the countdown clock at stations and the MTA app. Otherwise, subways, buses and trains were running normally.

“The airline systems may be in disarray but New York City’s transit system is going full speed,” said MTA chief Janno Lieber.

Media companies were also hit by the outage, which left some billboards eerily black in Times Square.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department could still respond to calls, but their central computer system– for looking up incident reports and other important information – was down.

In a statement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was “closely monitoring impacts to critical infrastructure,” and was working to ensure that 911 systems around the state remained fully functional. Some counties were relying on work-arounds to respond to calls, according to Hocul’s office.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he had been briefed on the CrowdStrike issue and had activated the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) overnight to provide guidance to key agencies on how to address the situation.

.By 6 a.m. Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz announced on X that the cybersecurity firm had deployed a fix, but it was unclear how quickly all the services would recover.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he wrote.

Alec Hamilton contributed reporting.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the relationship between CrowdStrike and Microsoft.