Global IT Outage Impacts Airports, Businesses, and Broadcasters

Massive Global IT Outage Impacts Airports, Businesses, and Broadcasters

A widespread technology issue that started late Thursday has caused chaos for airports, businesses, and broadcasters across the globe. The impact of the outage was felt in the Bay Area, with San Francisco International Airport confirming it was experiencing a tech issue that affected operations airport-wide.

According to NBC News, flights were grounded in several countries due to the outage, which also affected stores and broadcasters in multiple countries. The issue seemed to be focused on Windows PCs, causing disruptions in various services and organizations.

Local media companies, including NBC Bay Area, were unable to broadcast live newscasts due to the outage. The website DownDetector reported growing outages in services at major companies such as Visa, ADT security, and Amazon, as well as airlines like American Airlines and Delta. Some banks were also impacted.

The cause of the massive IT outage appears to be related to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Many users reported encountering the dreaded “blue screen of death” on their computers during the outage. CrowdStrike acknowledged the issue and was in the process of rolling back an update that triggered the problem.

Meanwhile, Microsoft confirmed that its cloud services have been mostly restored after experiencing an outage. The tech giant said customers in the Central U.S. region may still encounter issues with Azure services and Microsoft 365 apps, but they are working to resolve these disruptions quickly.

It is not yet clear if the Microsoft outage is directly linked to the CrowdStrike incident. The situation is still developing, and updates are being provided as the companies involved work to restore services to affected customers.