Global financial system crippled by digital pandemic: IT outage may final days

Experts fear a massive Microsoft outage which sparked chaos around the world will continue to impact services for days.

The technical fault, which caused Windows software to suddenly shut down, grounded flights and knocked hospitals, GP surgeries, train services, banks, stock exchanges and TV channels offline.

It was described by IT bosses today as a ‘digital pandemic affecting millions’, with others fearing the disruption will last long into the weekend.

Among those taking extra steps today was the Mercedes F1 team, which since 2019 has been an official partner of CrowdStrike, the US cyber security firm which admitted to being responsible for the error.

A team spokesperson said it was working to apply ‘the relevant fixes’ ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend.

It comes after a day of chaos which saw departure boards immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British air travel since before the Covid pandemic. 

In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Belfast and Delhi staff set up a whiteboard to record departures. 

Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

British train passengers have been warned to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’, while NHS England said patients should not attend GP appointments unless told otherwise due to problems with the appointment and patient record system. There is no known problem with 999 services. 

Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an ‘issue’ with its 365 apps and operating systems and said a resolution was ‘forthcoming’. 

US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error and said  ‘fix has been deployed’. The firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’. 

Windows is the most used operating system in the world, meaning the outage is affecting almost every part of the global economy – with supermarkets and cafes, including Morrisons, Waitrose and the bakery chain Gail’s, unable to take card payments. TV channels including Sky News and CBBC spent time off air this morning. 

As engineers battle to restore services – 

Around the world banks, supermarkets and other major institutions said computer issues were disrupting services.

Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, a professional IT association, described the incident as a ‘digital pandemic’.

He said: ‘When one service provider in the digital supply chain is affected, the whole chain can break, causing large-scale outages. This incident is a clear example of what could be termed a digital pandemic, a single point of failure impacting millions of lives globally.’

GPs have also been hit, with surgeries in Cumbria, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the West Midlands taking to social media to say their systems had been affected. 

The issue has hit the EMIS system, which allows doctors to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals.

Speaking to MailOnline, a practice manager of a GP practice in Berkshire said: ‘We are completely dead in the water.

‘We can’t see any patients are systems are down. It’s not clinically safe to treat patients because we can’t see their notes.

‘Can’t give out prescriptions and even if we do hand write them the problem is also affecting the pharmacies. It’s affecting the whole area and hospitals are in an even worse situation.’

Hospitals have also been affected, with Salisbury District Hospital saying it was experiencing delays. 

The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it was experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published.

Bristol Water said it is experiencing company wide IT issues but the billing department remains operating. 

The Port of Dover saw longer queues this morning, but said it is now operating as normal.  

Even football clubs have been affected, with Manchester United and Blackburn Rovers telling fans that its ticketing platform was malfunctioning. 

Microsoft 365 say they are investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access apps and services.

‘Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,’ they said on X this morning.

‘We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.’

The Government was today urged to call a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee to discuss the issue.  

Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office Spokesperson Christine Jardine MP said: ‘The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised.

‘Getting critical infrastructure up and running again must be priority number one. The National Cyber Security Centre should also be working with small businesses and other organisations to help them deal with the outage.’ 

Research firm Cirium found today was set to be the busiest day for UK flight departures since October 2019 – before Covid – with more than 3,214 planned. 

Among the impacted firms are Ryanair, with the airline posting to its website: ‘Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage.

‘Affected passengers will be notified and any passengers travelling across the network on Fri 19 July should check their Ryanair app for the latest updates on their flight.

‘We advise passengers to arrive at the airport three hours in advance of their flight to avoid any disruptions.

‘We regret any inconvenience caused to passengers by this third party IT issue, which is outside of Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating across the network.’

Edinburgh Airport said the IT outage is causing longer waiting times.

Stansted Airport said that some airline check-in services are being done manually as a result of the IT outage, but ‘flights are still operating as normal’.

Meanwhile, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) – parent company of Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern – warned passengers to expect delays because of the issue.

The firm posted on social media: ‘We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network. Our IT teams are actively investigating to determine the root cause of the problem.

‘We are unable to access driver diagrams at certain locations, leading to potential short-notice cancellations, particularly on the Thameslink and Great Northern networks.

‘Additionally, other key systems, including our real-time customer information platforms, are also affected. We will provide additional updates when we can. In the meantime, please regularly check your journey before you travel.’

South Western Railway said all its ticket vending machines had stopped working due to IT issues.

It advised passengers to ‘purchase your ticket online, on the train or speak to a member of station staff’.

A checkout worker in a Little Waitrose at Kings Cross Station told customers: ‘It is cash only at the moment. The card machines are not working.’

A queue of thirty people was seen snaking around the supermarket.

One shopper said: ‘There is a massive IT issue and all the self checkouts are not working. It is cash only.’

Toby Murray, associate professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, Australia, said it was possible a ‘buggy’ update to one of global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s products may have been the cause of the global outage.

‘CrowdStrike Falcon has been linked to this widespread outage,’ he said.

‘CrowdStrike is a global cyber security and threat intelligence company. Falcon is what is known as an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform, which monitors the computers that it is installed on to detect intrusions – hacks – and respond to them.

‘That means that Falcon is a pretty privileged piece of software in that it is able to influence how the computers it is installed on behave.

‘For example, if it detects that a computer is infected with malware that is causing the computer to communicate with an attacker, then Falcon could conceivably block that communication from occurring. If Falcon is suffering a malfunction then it could be causing a widespread outage for two reasons – one: Falcon is widely deployed on many computers, and two: because of Falcon’s privileged nature.

‘Falcon is a bit like anti-virus software: it is regularly updated with information about the latest online threats (so it can better detect them). We have certainly seen anti-virus updates in the past causing problems. It is possible that today’s outage may have been caused by a buggy update to Falcon.’

In the US, emergency services lines are reportedly down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their frustration and confusion at their computers also shutting down.   

Sky Sports Presenter Jacquie Beltrao has posted on X saying: ‘We’re obviously not on air – we’re trying @SkyNews Breakfast.’

This has also lead to travel chaos as passengers attempting to board flights have been unable to check in due to the technical issues.

American Airlines was forced to ground its flights this morning due to a communication issue, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s status page.

Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry had reported outages that affected operations.

Frontier said earlier that a ‘major Microsoft technical outage’ hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.

‘The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,’ Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN.

A message on the CrowdStrike support page read: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheckblue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

‘Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.’

Sky News and Microsoft have been contacted for comment. 

Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft‘s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down. 

According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google‘s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high profile clients.

In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on. 

Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.