Global Internet Outage Affects Flights, Halts Business Worldwide

A global IT outage caused major airlines to ground planes and business to halt worldwide early Friday (July 19) morning.

The outage was caused by an issue with Microsoft cloud computing services and resulted in a massive information technology glitch, NBC News reports. Flights from major carriers, including American Airlines , Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, were grounded in several countries due to communications issues, while stores and broadcasters went offline.

Delta ordered a "global ground stop" amid during the outage, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity, announced Friday morning. Alaska State Troopers announced that 911 and non-emergency phone numbers weren't working statewide "due to a nationwide technology-related outage" in an update shared shared on the department's Facebook account .

Microsoft said issues with its Azure Service and Microsoft 365 apps were solved early Friday morning despite companies across the United States and Europe still reported problems, claiming that "a small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact." The company told NBC News that an update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike resulted in the global outages.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz claimed that the outages were caused by a "defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts" in a post shared on his X account.

"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," Kurtz wrote. "The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers."