Flights grounded and travelers stranded — including at JFK and LaGuardia — after tech outage cripples banks and other companies around the globe
A failed tech update grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off the air across the world early Friday — with travelers at JFK and LaGuardia airports among those left stranded by the unprecedented and wide-scale internet disruption.
The global crisis was triggered when US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike deployed a faulty software update to computers running Microsoft Windows overnight, crashing them and leaving the ominous so-called “blue screen of death.”
“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” tech expert Troy Hunt, an Australian Microsoft regional manager, tweeted early in the chaos.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
Microsoft said the underlying cause of the global outage had been fixed by early Friday — but the impact of cybersecurity outages was continuing to affect some Office 365 apps and services.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz had earlier stressed that it was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” — and that a fix was on the way.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said in a statement on X.
Major US airlines — American, Delta and United — were forced to ground flights, while other carriers and airports around the world also reported delays and disruptions.
Across the globe, 4,983 flights were canceled and another 43,826 were delayed, according to FlightAware data as of 11:30 p.m. Friday evening.
At least 3,235 flights were canceled and 11,956 were delayed in the US alone.
Long lines formed at Big Apple airports and across the country as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at the height of summer travel.
LaGuardia Airport canceled 118 of its departures and delayed 226, FlightAware data shows. In Newark, 117 flights were canceled and another 294 delayed.
JFK travelers also faced 191 delayed and 67 canceled flights.
Gary Robertson, a frustrated Queens father, raged at JFK Airport early Friday after learning his family’s flight to Orlando, Fla., where his family was scheduled to catch a cruise, was among the hundreds canceled nationwide.
“[It’s] extremely frustrating when you’re schlepping all the bags and you got two young kids, you know, and obviously you work hard to plan your trip to go away and mellow out a little bit — and then you got to deal with more aggravation,” Robertson, a 42-year-old salesman, told The Post.
“It’s not how I wanted this day to start out.”
Bronx couple, Mitch and Hope Mitchell, were also left scrambling after their flight from JFK to Minneapolis was axed at the last minute – forcing them to miss the first day of a work conference.
“[It’s] frustrating, very frustrating,” Hope, 37, told The Post.
Meanwhile, the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” appeared everywhere – including Macy’s flagship store in the Big Apple, as well as airport terminals from Los Angeles to Minneapolis.
Courts in New York City, Boston and Southern California were interrupted by the outage.
In Manhattan, a criminal court proceeding for Harvey Weinstein, who is charged with rape was delayed 90 minutes due to disruptions to court and corrections computer systems.
The Mass General Brigham health care system in Massachusetts also canceled all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits on Friday “due to the severity” of the global IT outage.
“Mass General Brigham remains open to provide care to patients with urgent health concerns in our clinics and emergency departments, and we continue to care for all patients currently receiving care in our hospitals,” they said in a post on X.
Mass General Brigham operates two of the US’s top-ranked hospitals — Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
New York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said any procedures that require anesthesia was being put on hold.
Harris Health System, which runs public hospitals and clinics in the Houston area, said it had to suspend hospital visits “until further notice.” A total of 51 hospitals run by Providence were affected in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington state.
The MTA advised New York commuters that customer information systems were “temporarily offline” due to the technical outage, but train and bus services were still running. The LIRR service wasn’t impacted, but arrival information, station announcements and platform signs were taken offline by the disruption.
“This is the first time in recent modern times we’ve seen something like this happen at this scale,” New York City’s chief technology officer, Matthew C. Fraser, said during an appearance on NBC News.
He added that the fix meant “they’ve stopped the bleeding.”
“New York City takes a lot of precautions in the way that it deploys technology,” Fraser said.
“Fortunately for us, our most critical systems — 911, 311, other things like our traffic management systems and our water management systems — live in a space where this type of impact will not impact the systems,” he continued.
“So as it stands right now, our most critical systems are up and running.”
President Biden was briefed on the outage and officials are in touch with CrowdStrike and impacted organizations, the White House said.
“His team is engaged across the interagency to get sector by sector updates throughout the day and is standing by to provide assistance as needed,” the White House said.
The outage also caused massive delays at both the southern and northern US borders.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The Windsor, Ontario, Police also reported long delays at US-Canada border’s Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
The effects of the outage and subsequent disruptions, too, were felt widely beyond the US.
News outlets in Australia — where telecommunications were severely affected — were pushed off air for hours.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices in the UK had problems with their appointment systems. Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, while Israel said its hospitals and post office operations were disrupted.
And banks and financial services companies from New Zealand to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and reported outages to their payment systems or websites and apps.
Some athletes and spectators descending on Paris ahead of the Summer Olympics were also delayed, but Games organizers insisted the disruptions were limited and didn’t affect ticketing or the torch relay.
With Post wires
