Queues construct at US borders as greatest IT outage wreaks extra havoc

The world is still reeling from what is being dubbed history’s biggest IT meltdown, with borders backed up for hours and hospitals being forced to cancel operations, following a glitch pushed out to a piece of software, ironically built to help protect computers from cyberattacks. 

Airports, hospitals, banks and stock markets across were world were sent spiralling into chaos after security software produced by American firm CrowdStrike caused computers running Microsoft Windows to reboot over and over again, rendering them unusable. 

In the States, the northern and southern borders are still locked up due to what has been dubbed the world’s biggest IT meltdown, causing snaking queues of cars to back up. 

Germany, meanwhile, has been forced to cancel operations in hospitals, endangering lives.

And in India and China, authorities are finally managing to wrestle back control of airports, allowing passengers to make much-needed journeys across the globe. 

So-called ‘Blue Screens of Death’ began popping up across the world on Friday morning, after CrowdStrike pushed out an update to its Falcon Sensor software, which allows its clients to detect and prevent cyberattack threats. 

By mid-morning, the outage was estimated to have caused $24billon in damages to the world’s economy. 

Part of this came in the form of delayed travel.  In the US, people seeking to enter from both the north and south have been forced to queue for hours as crossing were delayed massively by the internet outage.

The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked on Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Even cars with people approved for a US Customers and Border Protection ‘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 make an appointment for an interview and submit to a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the Us. 

Meanwhile, at the US-Canada border, Windsor Police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Officials at international travel hubs desperately wrangled the outage, trying their hardest to bring some stability amid the IT chaos. 

Officials at Hong Kong International Airport said that normal operations have been resumed, according to Chinese state media.

Citing the city-state’s airport authority, media said that passenger check-in systems have returned to normal. 

In India, two major airlines, SpiceJet and Air India, said that they managed to resolve all issues caused by CrowdStrike’s glitch. 

SpiceJet managing director Ajay Singh said: ‘Our team worked tirelessly to ensure minimal disruption to our passengers’ travel plans, and we are proud to have successfully operated all our scheduled flights.’

An Air India spokesperson, meanwhile, said: ‘We confirm that none of Air India flights on 19 July was cancelled on account of the worldwide outage of travel systems, though there were some delays due to the impact of the outage on airport services. 

‘Air India’s own, resilient IT infrastructure remained unaffected yesterday and continues to function as normal.’ 

Eurowings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, said it expected to return to ‘largely scheduled’ flight operations on Saturday.

On Friday, the global IT outage had forced the airline to cancel about 20% of its flights, mostly on domestic routes. Passengers were asked to take trains instead.

‘Online check-in, check-in at the airport, boarding processes, booking and rebooking flights are all possible again,’ the airline said Saturday on X. ‘However, due to the considerable extent of the global IT disruption there may still be isolated disruptions’ for passengers, it said.

While international travel seems to be sorting itself out, emergency services still appear to be affected by the outage. 

In Portland, Oregon, mayor Ted Wheeler declared an emergency on Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by the global internet outage.

Wheeler said during a news conference that while emergency services calls weren’t interrupted, dispatchers were having to manually track 911 calls with pen and paper for a few hours. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.

And two German hospitals in the northern German cities of Luebeck and Kiel have cancelled elective operations scheduled for Friday, their operator said. 

Patient care and emergency services are being maintained, the University Clinic of Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) added in a statement. 

The UK’s National Cyber Security Center’s former head, Ciaran Martin, said the worst of the crisis was over, ‘because the nature of the crisis is that it went very wrong very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly and essentially it was turned off.’

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

‘If you’re in aviation, you’ve got people, planes and staffs all stranded in the wrong place- So we are looking at days. I’d be surprised if we’re looking at weeks.’  

But other nations have warned that the issue may not be resolved any time soon. Australia’s cyber-intelligence agency said on Saturday that ‘malicious websites and unofficial code’ were being released online, which could cause further havoc if implemented.

The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) said ‘a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident’. 

On its website, the agency said its cyber security centre ‘strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only’.

Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X on Saturday that Australians should ‘be on the lookout for possible scams and phishing attempts’.