The largest IT outage ever to occur has shut down flights, banks, and businesses on Friday morning.
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Major U.S. airlines, including American, Delta, and United, are currently grounded due to a worldwide tech outage.
This IT nightmare — which is the largest outage in history — is also impacting Microsoft Windows and computer systems. Furthermore, it’s impacting banks, police and fire stations, public transit, hospitals, news broadcasters, stock exchanges, and more.
While many are claiming the outage is caused by a cyberattack, it’s actually a result of a bug in an update by massive cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Largest IT Outage Ever to Occur — Shuts Down Flights, Banks, and Businesses
This morning, Microsoft posted a statement regarding the issue.
“We acknowledge how impactful this is for our customers, and we’re working to still receiving obstructions as soon as possible,” the company said.
Additionally, George Kurtz, the founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, attended a live interview on the Today show to address the matter.
“The system was sent an update and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system. And we identified this very quickly and remediated the issue. As systems come back online and they’re rebooted, they’re working,” he said.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, and to anyone affected by this including our company,” he continued. “It is our mission to make sure that every customer is recovered. We’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were.”
Thankfully, while Microsoft users are impacted, Mac and Linux hosts are not.
As for the airlines, while many systems are normalizing, backups and delays will likely remain throughout the day.
Many people are sharing their thoughts about the global outage online.
“How the world eventually ends. We got a glimpse today of an almost-global-freak-out, just because of lack of data,” one person wrote on X.