Airlines, banks and TV stations around the world suffer from a power outage

The main victims of the fall of CrowdStrike

The global outage has disrupted the operations of airlines such as Delta Airlines, United and American Airlines, paralysing dozens of airports. Banks in Australia and companies such as Sky News and Ryanair have also experienced service interruptions lasting a couple of hours.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says it is assisting airlines due to communication issues. “The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue affecting the IT systems of US airlines,” FAA spokesperson Jeannie Shiffer says in a statement to The Verge. “Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with grounding their fleets until the issue is resolved.”

Berlin airport is also warning of travel delays due to “technical issues.” Many 911 emergency call centers in Alaska have also been affected by the problems. One airline in India has even resorted to handwritten boarding passes due to the disruptions.

According to Andrés Velázquez, president of cybersecurity firm Mattica, there were two issues in tandem that made the global blackout situation worse: first there was an outage in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service, affecting primarily customers in the central United States, including some airlines. Meanwhile, many Windows devices experienced problems due to a faulty update to CrowdStrike, specifically its Falcon Sensor software.

For his part, CrowdStrike CEO said that they are already aware of the situation and are working on it. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a flaw found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” said George Kurtz in a post on X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

Affected machines are unable to overcome the blue screen without manual intervention, complicating remediation on cloud-based servers and laptops used remotely.

The situation is causing long work days for IT administrators worldwide.