Mass IT outage hits global airports, businesses and broadcasters

Major airlines, medical facilities, businesses and police forces around the world were hit by a massive information technology glitch Friday, with Microsoft computers around the world showing “Blue Screens of Death.”

The cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said Friday that the outages were the result of a routine software update gone wrong, “not a security incident or cyberattack.”

CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity services and software for many large corporations that use Microsoft systems, later issued a new software update that automatically fixed some computers. But others must be manually restarted and patched, causing huge delays.

Microsoft announced late Friday morning that its 365 apps and services had recovered, and CrowdStrike said a fix had been deployed early in the morning. But some frozen computers couldn’t receive CrowdStrike’s automatic update, leading to some of the problems lingering into the weekend.

Many flights were delayed as of Friday afternoon. Starbucks locations in New York had resumed normal wait times, despite its mobile order-ahead feature still not working.

The glitch brought chaos to a number of key institutions and businesses around the world that may take some time to clear up.

Many flights were grounded across the globe, and stores and broadcasters in several countries went offline. According to the aviation technology company FlightAware, the tech glitch was responsible for more than half of the U.S.’s 1,352 flight delays and cancellations before 8 a.m. ET on Friday.

Major carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, all issued ground stops Friday morning citing communications issues. Passengers traveling to the United States from as far away as Japan had their flights canceled. Delta ordered a “global ground stop,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.

Follow live updates on the global tech outage

George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, said the problems could persist.

“It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover,” he told NBC’s “TODAY” show on Friday.

Kurtz said the company was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” adding the issue had been fixed on its end.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said. “We’re just trying to sort out where the negative interaction was,” he said of the faulty update that affected Windows PCs.

Earlier, in a post on X, Kurtz said that the outages were due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”