Microsoft global IT outage: Dozens more flights cancelled as recovery tool released

More than 1,500 flights were cancelled for the third straight day in the US yesterday amid a global tech outage due to Crowdsource’s botched software update.

Thousands of passengers were left stranded at airports across the US as nearly 1,600 flights travelling within or out of the US were cancelled, and about 8,500 delayed on Sunday, data from flight tracking website FlightAware.com suggests.

Delta Air Lines chief Ed Bastian said the company is still working to recover its system and restore operations.

“Canceling a flight is always a last resort, and something we don’t take lightly,” Mr Bastian said.

The CEO of Crowdstrike, the company at the centre of the global IT outage, confirmed that the issue affecting millions of Windows devices “was not a security or cyber incident”.

Posting on the social media platform X on Friday afternoon, George Kurtz said: “Our customers remain fully protected.”

Normal GP service “cannot be resumed immediately” after Friday’s global IT outage caused a “considerable backlog”, ​the British Medical Association has warned.

The trade union for doctors said GPs would “need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend”, adding that NHS England should “make clear to patients” this was the case.

The British Medical Association (BMA) said its GP committee would continue to talk to NHS England and patient record system supplier EMIS to secure a “better system of IT backup” to ensure the “disaster” was not repeated.

It is something the former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, warned of when he made the case for us to all think about how prepared we are for prolonged disruption during a cyberattack. While, George Kurtz, the founder and chief executive of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, has made it clear there was no possibility that this power outage was a cyber-attack it has certainly focussed our minds.

It is also a reminder of the smash Netflix hit Leave the World Behind which pondered the stark, post-apocalyptic depiction of the immediate aftermath of an attack. In the movie, the first time anyone notices that something is wrong is when they discover their mobile phone coverage is out, and their wifi disappears, but it takes a push notification on their TV screens for the characters to learn that an attack has been launched.

Chris Stokel-Walker reports:

It’s our powerlessness that is so shocking. This morning, millions of people were left staring at a blue computer screen bearing a glum emoji and the message: “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you.”

This “blue screen of death” was not selective. Supermarkets, banks, airlines, hospitals – these and many more businesses, organisations and individuals across the globe, rich and poor, were caught up in the chaos. For hours, the world effectively more or less halted as Microsoft customers using Windows 10 suffered an IT outage.

Apparently it was caused by a glitch in an update issued by CrowdStrike – ironically, a cybersecurity firm. It took a while, but they reported that if customers deleted the update and restarted their computer, normality could quickly be restored.

The British Medical Association has warned that normal GP service “cannot be resumed immediately” after the global IT outage caused a “considerable backlog”.

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chairman of GPC England, the representative body for GPs at the BMA, said: “Friday was one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England. Without a clinical IT system many were forced to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients.

“While GPs and their teams worked hard to look after as many as they could, without access to the information they needed much of the work has had to be shifted into the coming week.

“GPs have been pulling out all the stops this weekend to deal with the effects of Friday’s catastrophic loss of service and, as their IT systems come back online, we thank them and their staff for their hard work under exceptionally trying circumstances.

“We also thank patients for bearing with general practice in this unprecedented situation.

“The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has meant a considerable backlog.

“Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday, GPs would still need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend, and NHSE (National Health Service England) should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately.

“The BMA’s GP committee will continue our dialogue with both EMIS and NHSE, both to make sure that the coming week can be used to recover as quickly as possible and to urgently work on securing a better system of IT backup so that this disaster is not repeated in future.”

On Friday, tech outages swept the world from hospitals and airlines, to banks and courts. Flights were grounded, payments delayed and hospitals across the world reported problems.

Crowdstrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, later issued a statement reassuring customers that the outage was not “a security incident or cyber attack.”