Payam Javan: A significant global tech outage on Friday severely impacted operations across various sectors, including airlines, broadcasters, and financial institutions. Major airlines such as American Airlines, Delta, United, and Allegiant Air were forced to halt flights due to communication problems. This disruption came shortly after Microsoft resolved a cloud services outage affecting several low-cost carriers. United Airlines confirmed that the outage was related to a third-party software issue and announced that they were holding all aircraft at departure airports while allowing flights already airborne to continue to their destinations.

In Australia, media, banking, and telecommunications companies experienced outages linked to a problem with Crowdstrike, a global cybersecurity firm. According to an alert from Crowdstrike, its “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash, commonly known as the “Blue Screen of Death.” Although the alert included a manual workaround, there was no indication that the outage was a cybersecurity incident, according to the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator.

The disruption had widespread effects, with airports in major cities like Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, and several Spanish locations reporting system issues and delays. International airlines, including Europe’s Ryanair, faced booking system problems. In Britain, medical booking systems and the Sky News broadcaster were affected, while banks and financial institutions worldwide, from Australia to South Africa, experienced service interruptions. Amazon’s AWS also reported connectivity issues with Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces, though it remains unclear if all disruptions were linked to Crowdstrike’s problems or if there were additional factors involved.