Flights on the ground, suspended surgeries, offline banks and blank broadcasts. This Friday, July 19, companies and services on all continents felt an interruption in technology, leaving them hostage to the software, according to AP reports. The cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rules out the possibility of a security breach or cyber attack.
Microsoft issued a statement saying that all of its services were affected following an outage that affected Teams, PowerBI and Fabric. Crowdstrike admitted that the cause of the problem was an update to its software, which protects Microsoft Windows from hacker attacks.
Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz stated that “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been released”, ensuring that the issues did not affect other operating systems.
According to Microsoft, the source of the problem would have been an update to the Azure software. Azure uses the Falcon tool, from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, used to detect and monitor possible cyber attacks.
One of the affected software is Microsoft 365. Microsoft already announced that the problem would be in a gradual resolution phase, however, the problems increased during the following hours.
According to the website DownDectector, where users reported Internet failures, services from Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines such as American Airlines and Delta were affected by the technological intermittency. In addition, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and some health services are also on the technological outage list.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
Also according to Downdetector, in Brazil, Banco Pan, Bradesco, Neon and Next reported problems.
In Israel, the ministries of communication and health highlighted problems with the post office and hospitals.
In the US, the FAA said United, American, Delta and Allegiant airlines had suspended flights.
In the United Kingdom, airlines, railways, hospitals and television stations were disrupted by computer problems. In England’s National Health Service (NHS), an outage occurred in the clinical computer system that holds medical records and is used for scheduling.
Air operations in India have been disrupted, affecting thousands of people.
The Hong Kong Airport Authority said in a statement that the disruption of some airlines at the city’s airport had forced the return of manual check-in.
In Amsterdam, the technological cut occurred on one of the busiest days of the year for the airport, at the beginning of many people’s summer holidays.
In Germany, Berlin Airport temporarily suspended flights. Some hospitals have reported problems. University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein canceled all elective surgeries scheduled for Friday, but patients and emergency care were not affected.
Zurich Airport suspended arrivals, allowing access only to flights that were already in the air.
At Rome Leonardo da Vinci airport, only a few flights to the US were delayed.
Australia was one of the countries most affected by the outage. The NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo banks, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, and telephone and internet companies such as Telstra. Media, including ABC and Sky News, had no TV or radio delivery and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows computers.
In South Africa, at least one major bank said it was experiencing “nationwide service disruptions” as customers said they were unable to make payments using their bank cards at supermarkets and gas stations.
In New Zealand, the interim Prime Minister of New Zealand reported that the problem is being assessed and has caused “inconvenience” to the public and companies. ASB and Kiwibank reported that their services were unavailable.
