US transportation, police and hospital systems stricken by global CrowdStrike IT outage

Thousands of air passengers were stranded across the US on Friday morning as a global IT outage grounded major domestic airlines and struck rail services, shipping and police emergency systems, as well as some hospital functions.

Microsoft’s Windows system was at the centre of technology hit by the outage , after it was disrupted by a faulty software update from the US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that it uses.

The problem left large numbers of workers around the world facing an error screen on computers, as experts began predicting it could turn out to be the largest-scale IT failure in history.

In the US, airports along the east coast from Miami to Boston were engulfed in chaos amid serious flight disruptions caused by the Microsoft Windows outage, which centered on Microsoft’s 365 applications.

At Denver international airport in Colorado, passengers turning up expecting to catch flights were greeted with flashing blue error messages on information screens.

According to the data tracker FlightAware, 518 flights had been cancelled and a further 720 delayed by 6am ET on Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that at least five carriers – American, United, Delta, Allegiant Air and Spirit – had issued ground stops, holding planes at airports. Smaller airlines including Frontier and SunCountry also reported outages in the early hours.

In a statement, the FAA said it was “closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at US airlines. Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved.”

Airports along the east coast and midwest appeared to bear the brunt of the chaos, with New York City and the Chicago region affected especially hard. American Airlines said that at 5am eastern time it managed to “safely re-establish our operation” and call off the ground stop.

But it was likely that disruptions would continue for several hours, given the knock-on effects of stopping flights. American is the world’s largest carrier in terms of its average load of almost 600,000 passengers a day.

United Airlines also said that some of its flights were resuming. The carrier said it was issuing waivers to make it easier to change travel plans using its website.

The outage caused havoc for Americans attempting to return to the US as well as domestic passengers. Patrica Sweeney told NBC News of her dismay when her American Airlines flight home from Tokyo to New York was cancelled. She described what happened when another American flight next to her gate was also cancelled: “You could just hear a roar of passengers – people are not happy,” she said.

According to Microsoft, the massive outage started at about 6pm eastern time on Thursday, with the first impact being felt in the central US region, and then spreading to the coasts. The initial disruption appears to have been suffered by customers using Azure services, a cloud computing platform used to manage applications.

In New York state, the Buffalo-based Kaleida Health network, which runs five hospitals in the region, reported problems with its systems overnight while saying it was getting services up and running again but, according to local media, adding: “We are encouraging all staff – as well as patients – to report as scheduled.”

As the crisis deepened across the US, other forms of transportation were hit. In New Jersey, two major shipping terminals, APM Terminals and Maher Terminals in Port Newark, delayed opening on Friday because of the outage.

In Washington DC, the website of the underground Metro commuter train system in the US capital remained down for several hours, but the Metro service said that its stations opened on time and trains and buses were operating as scheduled on Friday.

The US secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, said that the department was monitoring events, especially at the airlines, closely. He said he would hold all airlines “to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers”.

Eric Swalwell, a Democratic Congress member from California who sits on the House cyber subcommittee, urged airlines to be “as transparent with passengers as possible and to show maximum flexibility as they accommodate re-bookings”. He expressed frustration that major US carriers were failing to update their passengers on social media.

“Millions of travelers need an update,” he said.

The outage also affected emergency services, including law enforcement. In Alaska, both 911 emergency and non-emergency call centers stopped working correctly across the state, and state troopers were forced to put out notices encouraging people to use manual phone lines.

Emergency call lines were also reportedly impaired in a number of other states, including Arizona, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.