Extraordinary IT Outage Hobbles Business Around the Globe

(Bloomberg) -- Computer systems failed across the globe on Friday (July 19), taking down services at airlines, banks, and the London Stock Exchange after a widely used cybersecurity program crashed and Microsoft Corporation separately reported problems with its cloud services. 

CrowdStrike Holdings warned customers on Friday that its Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring product was causing Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. It was unclear what triggered the issues, which coincided with disruptions of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 office software services.

“We’re aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.”

There have been few outages of this scale in the past few years. “This is unprecedented,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg News. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”

Cascading Failure

The cascading failures underscored how a growing proportion of businesses have moved services and support processes online in recent years, seeking to cut costs or better unify global operations. 

In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon.com’s cloud service – which, like Azure, underpins many of the world’s online platforms – disrupted the operation of tens of thousands of websites including ESPN.com.

In June 2021, issues at content delivery network Fastly took out the New York Times, Reddit, Bloomberg News and UK government services among others for about a day. Later that year, issues at Amazon’s AWS cloud service resulted in visitors to Walt Disney Company theme parks not being able to check in online, Ticketmaster postponing Adele ticket sales, and no one swiping on Tinder.

On Friday, McDonald’s Corporation, United Airlines Holdings, and the LSE Group were among the major companies to disclose a variety of issues with communications to customer service. KLM said it was suspending most flights because of a global computer outage. They were among the more prominent global corporations to report issues with their operations. 

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt, an Australian security consultant and creator of the hack-checking website Have I Been Pwned, said in a post on social media platform X.

System Issues

Australia’s AGL Energy said in a post on X it was currently experiencing system issues due to a CrowdStrike outage. Crowdstrike shares fell as much as 14% in initial premarket trading after reports of the outage.

There’s no indication that CrowdStrike’s problems are linked to any cyber-attacks, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish information security company WithSecure Oyj.

Crowdstrike representatives didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment in the US, Asia and Europe. 

The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday, and have been blamed on the failure of Microsoft services Azure and 365, the company’s internet-based office software suite. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, grounded flights for over two hours. The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started resuming flights from 11 p.m. New York time.

“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact,” Microsoft said in its latest status update.

The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it’s experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published. 

In Asia, Japanese users began reporting glitches with Microsoft services in the afternoon. Airlines at Mumbai, Narita, Singapore, and Hong Kong airports reverted to manually checking in passengers. 

The latest failures came right after Microsoft said it had resolved an Azure cloud services outage. The company’s status pages had earlier showed that Azure and 365 experienced problems for several hours.