Tech Outage Leaves Travelers Stranded, Stops Business at Banks and Hospitals Worldwide

Everything from travel to banks to hospitals were affected by a major technology outage worldwide Friday.

CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, blamed on a faulty system update, USA Today reported.

CrowdStrike touts itself as being used by over half of Fortune 500 companies. The company said one of its recent updates had a defect that impacted Microsoft’s Windows Operating System.

Company officials said this was “not a security incident or cyberattack.”

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” according to a statement from CrowdStrike. 

George Kurtz, the company’s CEO, apologized for what happened in an interview with NBC’s Today. 

In the meantime, Microsoft said “the underlying cause has been fixed.” However, residual impacts will affect some Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Hundreds of flights were canceled, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines.

Most flights were grounded less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved a cloud-services-related outage.

Public transportation was also affected.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C., said its “website and some of our internal systems are currently down.” Trains and buses were running as scheduled. 

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City, said its buses and trains were also not affected but “some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline due to a worldwide technical outage.”

The outages disrupted London’s Stock Exchange and caused major train delays in the U.K.

British broadcaster Sky News was forced to go off air, and medical facilities in Europe and the U.S. had to cancel some services. 

There were also disruptions at airports in Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong and India.

The FAA is closely monitoring Friday’s events.