Global IT outage leaves thousands stranded at airports amid chaos at hospitals, government agencies and 911 systems

CNN
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What could be “the largest IT outage in history” has disrupted sectors across the globe – leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports, emergency communication services down and blood donation centers without vital shipments.

Airlines, businesses, government agencies, health and emergency services, banks and schools and universities around the world ground to a halt or saw services disrupted due to a flawed software update for Microsoft Windows operating systems issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN. CrowdStrike’s CEO said a fix has been deployed, but experts say getting systems back in order will be a lengthy process.

As of early Saturday, hundreds of flights flights into, out of or within the United States were canceled or delayed. The day before, more than 3,000 flights had been canceled and more than 11,000 delayed, according to FlightAware.com.

All flights were grounded for United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Allegiant Airlines on Friday. Airlines later announced they were resolving issues and resuming flights.

Frustrated passengers lined up at airports backed up with flight cancellations and delays, missing life events like funerals and birthdays.

After spending more than 19 hours at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one passenger won’t be getting home to Los Angeles anytime soon.

“I couldn’t get another flight rebooked because the system is down, so I couldn’t get any vouchers for food, hotel, nothing,” Kiah Hampton told CNN on Friday afternoon.

Hampton described sleeping on the floor at the airport after a previous flight was canceled last night, adding, “It seems like I am going to have to sleep here tonight.”

New Jersey resident Jennifer Small likewise slept at the airport overnight and had her flight canceled twice.

“I want to get home to my son. I want to get home to Jersey,” Small said, adding she doesn’t believe she will be able to travel home until Saturday.

Thousands of people crammed together in airports across the country, waiting for answers. Passengers Ty Kelley, who was traveling to Philadelphia to attend a funeral, described it as a chaotic scene.

“It’s wild, it’s crazy, it’s crowded — I have anxiety right now,” she said. “I’m going to wait in this long line and try and get to Philadelphia today.”

Another passenger told CNN she had been traveling with her toddler to Boston for a birthday party. “It has been frustrating to say the least,” Spirit Airlines customer Miya Haney said.

The issues didn’t just plague airports. Americans felt the impacts of the outage in various facets of their everyday lives, including while trying to call 911 during emergencies in some areas, getting or renewing their driver’s licenses or shipping or receiving packages.

There have been reports of 911 outages in various states, like Alaska, and cities, like Phoenix, where the system was down for hours but has since been restored. Meanwhile, in New York City, 911 services are working.

Driver’s license offices are closed or have limited services in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia because of the ongoing outages.

Shipping companies, namely UPS and FedEx, are warning customers there may be some service delays Friday because of the tech outage.

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Meanwhile, thousands of companies around the world are struggling with payment processing after the outage brought down systems across a wide range of businesses. The ongoing is also impacting major hotels, including Marriott International and some Hilton hotels.

Cybercriminals are already capitalizing on the chaos by promoting fake websites filled with malicious software designed to compromise unsuspecting victims, according to warnings from the US government and multiple cybersecurity professionals.

Former McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt told CNN that a group of private sector and government agencies worked overnight to “ascertain the threat” and find a solution to the global outage. The call included the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other private and government organizations.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers Friday for the outage and said the company is working with those affected.

“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” Kurtz posted on X. “We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.”

But that could be easier said than done: Manual restarts of individual systems take time and expertise that some customers don’t have, which is why companies are slow to recover from the outage.

CrowdStrike promised customers “full transparency” on how the outage occurred and that it will “prevent anything like this from happening again.”

Some hospitals have had to cancel appointments and surgeries

While most hospitals remained open to treat medical emergencies, some said an inability to access electronic medical records and order lab tests and prescriptions had caused them to cancel patient appointments and surgeries.

Hospital workers have scrambled to provide needed care to patients without the technology they rely on.

Kim Brown was near the end of her shift Thursday night as a labor and delivery nurse at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, California, when the hospital’s computer systems, which it relies on to care for women in labor and their babies, went down.

“All of our babies get little plastic tags that will set off an alarm if they get too close to an exit or an elevator. That went down,” Brown said. “It was unnerving because we had zero information. It was just, ‘Oh, well, everything’s out now.’“

With the outage posing a security risk to newborn babies, the hospital called security guards to sit by the elevators to keep them safe.

At the postpartum care unit in Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, nurse Laura Topete said she ran into a roadblock trying to get analgesic drugs for a woman who was in pain after delivery, but couldn’t access the doctor’s orders to see what kind of medications she could have.

“The patient was in pain longer than she needed to be,” Topete said.

Epic Systems, a company that makes widely used electronic health records systems for hospitals and doctors’ offices, said on Friday that its Nebula cloud-based platform had been impacted by the outage overnight and that some services, including telehealth visits, were not available during the outage. Another electronic medical records company, Veradigm, also said its systems were impacted by the CrowdStrike outage.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services said it is “working to assess the impact of the Crowdstrike outage on patient care and HHS systems, services, and operations,” along with federal, state, local and private sector partners.

In addition to hospitals, blood donation centers have experienced challenges and are altering blood shipment methods due to flight delays. New York Blood Center, which supplies about 200 hospitals in the Northeast, initiated an emergency driving operation to distribute collected blood. And Blood Assurance was concerned for its planned shipment of at least 20 platelets — the disc-shaped fragments that help with clotting — due to flight issues.

Countless government agencies are at a standstill

The impacts of the global tech outage were felt across the US as countless government agencies waited for services to get back to normal.

The mayor of Portland, Oregon, issued an emergency declaration due to the ongoing outage. It affected the city’s servers in city data centers, employee computers and single sign-on to cloud services, Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a news release.

In Southern California, the disruption is causing connectivity issues at the Los Angeles County Superior Court and it temporarily limited jail bookings in San Diego County, officials said.

Elsewhere, some voting locations in Arizona experienced outages in Maricopa County as early voting continues in the state’s primary, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department. The county is the fourth-most populous in the US and is home to Phoenix, the county website said.

The governor of New York described impacts of the outage on transportation links and health care facilities as an “unprecedented situation.” The state’s top priority, however, is emergency services.

“We are working with localities to ensure that 911 systems are operational,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. The 911 system is working in all 62 state counties, according to Hochul.

On a federal level, the United States Customs and Border Protection experienced “processing delays” that may lead to longer wait times at US ports of entry. CBP said it is working to restore its systems to full capacity and mitigate impacts on its operations as well as on international trade and travel, a spokesperson said Friday.

The Social Security Administration closed its local offices to the public on Friday after the outage shut down numerous services. The agency said in a statement that it expects longer wait times for the national 800 phone number, and some online services may be unavailable.

The US Department of Justice said in a memo that it is searching for workarounds but warned staff that the CrowdStrike issue “is significant and there is currently no estimated restoration time.”