Global IT Outage: Airlines Rush to Get Back on Track

Transport providers, businesses and governments were scrambling Saturday to get their systems back online after long outages in the wake of the widespread technology outage.

The biggest ongoing impact has been on air travel. Airlines cancelled thousands of flights on Friday, many of their planes and crews are now in the wrong places, while airports are facing ongoing problems with check-in and security procedures.

At the heart of the massive turmoil is Crowd Strikea cybersecurity company. Providing software to dozens of companies The company says the problem occurred when it rolled out a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.

Here is the latest news:

Microsoft: 8.5 million Windows devices affected

Microsoft said 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by a faulty cybersecurity update on Friday, causing disruptions around the world.

A post on Microsoft’s blog on Saturday was the first estimate of the extent of the disruption caused by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s software update.

“We currently estimate that the CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows PCs,” David Weston, Microsoft’s chief cybersecurity officer, said in a blog post.

“Although the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by companies that operate many critical services.”

Such a major disruption is rare, Weston said, but it “shows the interconnected nature of our vast ecosystem.” Windows is the dominant operating system for personal computers worldwide.

Austrian doctors’ group calls for better protection of patient data

In Austria, a leading medical organisation said the global IT outage had exposed the vulnerability of digitally-based health systems.

“Yesterday’s incidents underline how important it is for hospitals to have analog backups” to protect patient care, Harald Meyer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Physicians, said in a statement on the organization’s website.

The organization called on governments to impose high standards for the protection and security of patient data, and called on health care providers to train staff and put in place crisis management systems.

“Fortunately, where there were problems, they remained small and short-lived, and many areas of care were not affected” in Austria, Meyer said.

Germany warns of scams after major IT outage

BERLIN – Many companies are still suffering from the consequences of a widespread technology outage, the German government’s IT security agency says.

“Many business operations and procedures have been disrupted due to a computer system outage,” BSI said on its website.

But the agency also said on Saturday that many affected areas had returned to normal.

It warned that cybercriminals were trying to exploit the situation through phishing, fake websites and other scams, and that “unofficial” software codes were in circulation.

The agency said it was not yet clear how the flawed code made its way into the CrowdStrike software update blamed for causing the outage.

European airports appear to be getting closer to normal.

LONDON – Heathrow Airport, Europe’s busiest, said it was operating normally on Saturday. “All systems are back up and passengers are continuing their journeys smoothly,” the airport said in a statement.

Some 167 flights due to leave UK airports on Friday were cancelled, while 171 flights due to leave by road were cancelled.

Meanwhile, the German news agency (dpa) quoted a spokesman for Berlin airport as saying that flights were departing on or close to schedule.

Nineteen flights took off in the early hours of Saturday morning, after authorities exempted them from the usual ban on night flights.

150 of the 552 scheduled round-trip flights at the airport were cancelled on Friday due to a network outage, disrupting the plans of thousands of passengers at the start of the summer holiday season in the German capital.

German hospital slowly getting back on track after widespread cancellations

BERLIN – The University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, which cancelled all elective surgeries on Friday due to a global IT outage, said Saturday it was gradually restoring its systems.

In a statement on its website, the company expected operations at its Kiel and Lübeck branches to return to normal by Monday and that “elective surgery can take place as planned and our ambulances can return to service.”

Britain’s transport system is still trying to get back on track

LONDON – Britain’s travel and transport industry is struggling to get back on schedule after the global security disruption as airline passengers face cancellations and delays on the first day of the summer holidays for many schoolchildren.

Gatwick Airport said the “majority” of scheduled flights were expected to take off. Manchester Airport said passengers were being checked in manually and there could be last-minute cancellations.

The port of Dover said it was seeing an influx of stranded airline passengers, waiting for hours to enter the port to board ferries to France.

Meanwhile, the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Centre has warned people and businesses to beware of phishing attempts as “opportunistic malicious actors” try to take advantage of the outage.

The worst of the crisis is over, said Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber ​​Security Centre, “because the nature of the crisis is that it went very wrong very quickly. It was detected very quickly and was essentially stopped.”

He told Sky News that some companies would be able to return to normal very quickly, but for sectors such as aviation it would take longer.

“If you’re in aviation, you’re going to have people, aircraft, employees stuck in places that aren’t appropriate… So we’re looking at days. I’d be surprised if we were looking at weeks.”

The German airline expects most of its flights to operate normally.

BERLIN – Eurowings, a budget airline subsidiary of Lufthansa, said it expects to return to “largely scheduled” flight operations on Saturday.

On Friday, the global information network outage forced the airline to cancel about 20% of its flights, mostly domestic ones. Passengers were asked to take trains instead.

“Online check-in, airport check-in, boarding, booking and rebooking flights are now possible again,” the airline said on its website on Saturday. “However, due to the significant scale of the global IT disruption, there may still be isolated disruptions” for passengers.

Delta Air Lines and its regional subsidiaries have canceled hundreds of flights.

DALLAS — Delta Air Lines Inc. and its regional affiliates had canceled more than a quarter of their East Coast flight schedule by mid-afternoon Friday, aviation data firm Cirium reported.

More than 1,100 flights have been canceled by Delta and its affiliates.

United and United Express have canceled more than 500 flights, or 12% of their schedule, and American Airlines has canceled 450 flights, or 7.5% of its schedule.

Southwest and Alaska do not use the CrowdStrike program that caused a global internet outage and led to the cancellation of fewer than a half-dozen flights each.

Portland, Oregon mayor declares state of emergency due to power outage

PORTLAND, Ore. — Mayor Ted Wheeler declared a state of emergency Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by a global internet outage.

While emergency calls were not interrupted, emergency personnel had to manually track emergency calls with pen and paper for several hours, Wheeler said at a news conference. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.

Border crossings into the United States are delayed.

SAN DIEGO — People trying to enter the United States from both the north and south found their border crossings delayed by internet outages.

The San Isidro port of entry was packed with traffic Friday morning as pedestrians waited for three hours to cross, According to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Even cars carrying people approved for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The program, known as SENTRI, moves passengers more quickly through customs and passport control if they schedule an interview and undergo a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the United States.

Meanwhile, on the U.S.-Canada border, Windsor police reported long delays at crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.