A global Microsoft outage created chaos on Friday, grounding flights in Westchester and impacting government offices, businesses and more in the Lower Hudson Valley and beyond.
Tech news site Wired said the outage mostly affected Microsoft Windows systems , spurred by a corrupted software update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that provides cloud work protection.
Related: Here's how the global Microsoft outage may, or may not, impact you
Westchester, Rockland impacted by global outage
Thousands of flights were halted across the country, including at Westchester County Airport, where Catherine Cioffi, spokesperson for the county, said flights from American Airlines and Delta experienced some delays and cancellations as early as 7 a.m.
Delta issued a ground stop for all flights nationwide around 7 a.m., impacting flights out of Westchester . Cioffi said JetBlue was the only airline that had some operational flights that morning.
The MTA announced around 7 a.m. that while Metro-North trains and subways were unaffected, some MTA customer information systems were "temporarily offline." Twelve hours later, arrival information for trains and buses had been restored, the MTA posted on X .
Westchester County Executive George Latimer said at a press conference Friday that the county department of Information Technology was notified of the outage around 1:30 a.m. and worked through the early morning hours to repair county PCs.
He said PCs connected to the Westchester County government network were affected but many issues were quickly resolved and resumed as normal on Friday. Operations at Westchester County Police Department and other emergency went on as usual.
"We’ve been in contact with all of our liaisons to provide a procedure to restore county PC to proper operating condition," Latimer said. "As we’re speaking here in the noon hour, some of this has been accomplished around the various departments, some of this has yet to be done."
Rockland County Executive Ed Day released a statement Friday morning saying some county systems were also minorly impacted but were repaired and back online earlier Friday morning.
"I want to assure the people of Rockland that we do not take these types of issues lightly and our ITS Department is regularly upgrading our IT Infrastructure," Day said.
More: Global Microsoft CrowdStrike outage creates issues from Starbucks to schools to hospitals
How NY responded to the global Microsoft outage
Gov. Kathy Hochul closely monitored “impacts to critical infrastructure, including finance and transportation” in New York on Friday. By 2 p.m., Hochul had left the NYS Information Technology Services office after being briefed on the state's response to the outage.
The state's chief cyber officer Colin Ahern assured New Yorkers that the incident was “not a security incident or cyberattack.”
New York worked with all parties, including local governments, to get impacted systems back online, he said, noting that the priority was to ensure 911 systems were operational and able to address emergency response needs.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement on X/Twitter it was closely monitoring the situation and provided a list of airlines still experiencing delays.
According to the FAA website, LaGuardia Airport was closed from midnight to around 6 a.m. this morning, when impacts of the outage began to be felt. As of 8:30 a.m., a ground stop for multiple airlines at the airport remains in effect.
John F. Kennedy International Airport said in a statement on X/Twitter that the Port Authority, which runs JFK and Newark, was not affected by the global outage but some individual airlines, including Delta, American and United, were experiencing delays and cancellations.
Airports across New York experienced the outage at varying degrees. Albany International Airport posted on X Friday, saying airlines that operate out of the airport were experiencing computer issues related to the outage.
The Buffalo Niagara International Airport “didn’t have any major issues due to this outage” Friday, a Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority spokesperson said — although there were a few cancellations and delays out of the airport in the morning.
April Wallace, who was supposed to be headed to Atlanta out of the Westchester County Airport Friday morning, struggled to find the words to describe the outage's impact on her travel plans.
"It ruins our whole day," she said, noting that she was unaware of the outage until she arrived at the airport. Initially, she was told her flight had been delayed until 10 a.m., but that soon changed to 3 p.m.
Dawn Lloyd was also supposed to be headed to Atlanta that morning. She recounted how the airline had kept her updated on changes to her flight due to the global outage.
"It's not what you want to hear when you've been traveling for a week," Wallace chimed in. "We're looking forward to getting home today, and getting some rest."
Contributing: Lohud's Tania Savayan and Ashley Fontones; USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network's New York State team staff
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Widespread Microsoft outage causes backups at Westchester Airport, impacts county offices
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