CLEVELAND, Ohio — A major outage early Friday morning at the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike led to disruptions in computer operating systems worldwide, reports say, and is affecting flights in the U.S., including at Hopkins International Airport.
ABC News reports American, United and Delta airlines have requested the FAA put a global stop on all flights because of the disruption. As of 5:30 a.m. Friday, United and American had delayed or canceled multiple flights scheduled to leave Hopkins, but most airlines’ flights appeared unaffected. (Hopkins’ flight status can be checked here.) Flights currently in the air will continue to their destinations.
But ABC reports no Delta, American or United flights will take off because of the outage. It’s unclear how long the grounding could last. Delta said in a statement online that all of its flights were “paused” as it worked through a “vendor technology issue.” Delta flights did not indicate any delays on Hopkins’ website as of 5:30 a.m.
Reports say Allegiant and Frontier also have grounded flights, although Frontier said in a statement online that its computer systems were “gradually” returning to normal.
Travelers at Los Angeles International Airport slept on a jetway floor, using backpacks and other luggage for pillows, due to a delayed United flight to Dulles International Airport early on Friday.
“We’re aware of a technical issue with CrowdStrike that is impacting multiple carriers. American is working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement to ABC News.
Crowdstrike tells CNBC the outage occurred because of an issue with an update. Crowdstrike tells CNBC it’s in the process of rolling back the update.
Microsoft was able to restore its cloud services Friday morning, CNBC reports. However, Microsoft says users of Azure services and Microsoft 365 apps in the central U.S. might still see disruptions. Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon. Payment systems at supermarkets in the Australia and U.K. reportedly were down. Some banks in New Zealand were offline.
The outage caused issues worldwide. In Australia, media, banks and telecom companies all were affected, Reuters reports. State broadcaster ABC and Sky News Australia had programs disrupted. Reports say airports in Amsterdam and Rome also were impacted.
According to CNN, Hong Kong Disneyland’s ticketing system was down and the online booking service for Cathay Pacific Airways also was out of service. Several airlines in India and other parts of Asia were experiencing problems, CNN reports.
The Guardian reports the outage also caused problems for Australia’s regional train network, knocking out the signals system, and also at the airport in Sydney, delaying some flights. ABC reports outages have been reported at airports throughout Europe, as well as at the London Stock Exchange.
Other problems in the U.K. include disruptions to some train services and also to Sky News. The budget airline Ryanair also was affected.
(The Associated Press contributed to this story.)