Whitehall crisis officials working on IT outage, Cabinet minister says

Whitehall crisis officials are working to end the “inconvenience” caused by the major IT outage hitting airlines, train companies and banks, Cabinet minister Pat McFadden has said.

An emergency Cobra meeting was held at official level – rather than ministers – on Friday morning to discuss the chaos, with a further gathering expected later.

Ministers are being kept updated and are in touch with their sectors to tackle the fallout from the IT failures, with Transport Secretary Louise Haigh saying she was working “at pace with industry” after trains and flights ground to a halt.

We will have a further meeting later today to make sure we are across the situation

US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is “actively working” to fix the flaw in a software update that sparked the outage that knocked businesses and institutions around the globe offline.

In the UK, transport networks were thrown into chaos, GP surgeries were unable to book appointments or access patient records and Sky News went off air.

Mr McFadden, who as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is in charge of the Whitehall machine, told the BBC: “We’ve had a major global IT outage today, causing huge inconvenience around the world, particularly for people travelling, for media organisations and for some parts of the health care system.”

Pressed on what the Government can do to help people, he said the “first thing we always want to identify is the cause” and then “to make sure that a fix is put in place and that the inconvenience that is being felt comes to an end as soon as possible”.

He also said: “Cobra officials met this morning. I’ve been kept updated about the situation throughout the day, the Prime Minister has been kept informed. We will have a further meeting later today to make sure we are across the situation.”

The Labour frontbencher said online services that the government provides “are largely unaffected now”.

The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised

Downing Street said Sir Keir Starmer did not chair the morning Cobra – which deals with matters of national emergency or major disruption, because he had been meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Cabinet.

A No 10 spokeswoman said she was not aware of any Whitehall departments being hit by the outage.

It came after the Liberal Democrats demanded an urgent Government response to the IT debacle.

The party’s Cabinet Office spokesperson, Christine Jardine, said: “The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised.

“Getting critical infrastructure up and running again must be priority number one. The National Cyber Security Centre should also be working with small businesses and other organisations to help them deal with the outage.

“This once again lays bare the need to improve our digital infrastructure and truly modernise our economy in order to prevent the incidents from happening again.”

Train companies were reporting delays and there were long queues at airports such as Gatwick, Luton and Edinburgh.

Transport Secretary Ms Haigh tweeted: “We are aware of IT failures impacting several transport operators and terminals today, and we’re working at pace with industry and across Government on the issue.

“There are no known security issues at present.

“If you’re planning to travel today, please follow operator advice and check ahead before leaving.

“Manual check-in may be required at airports and there may be train cancellations and delays.”