Airlines gradually resume services after global IT failure

The airlines gradually resumed services this Saturday, the day after an unprecedented computer glitch that caused chaos at airports and also affected hospitals, railway companies and financial firms around the world.

The outage was caused by a faulty update of an antivirus program from U.S. cybersecurity group CrowdStrike Falcon on Microsoft's Windows operating systems.

The outage canceled flights at a multitude of airports, where hundreds of passengers filled terminals waiting to find out if they could travel.

Several U.S. airlines reported that they had already resumed operations. On Friday, at least three states suffered disruptions to their emergency services and at least 2,400 flights were canceled across the country.

"According to our information, flights have resumed across the country, but there is still some congestion," a government representative told a news conference reported by AFP.

In Asia, airports in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand announced the restoration of their check-in services.

Operations also returned to normal at airfields in India, Indonesia and Singapore. Beijing's airports were not affected, China's state television said.

"I would like to personally apologize to all the organizations, groups and individuals who have been affected by this disruption," CrowdStrike CEO, George Kurtz said on CNBC.

The company ruled out a cyberattack or computer security problem. The bug, which is being fixed, did not affect users of Mac and Linux systems.

Major airports in Europe - including Berlin, which suspended all flights on Friday - reported that aircraft departures and arrivals were resuming.

In Mexico, airlines appeared to continue to have problems, with Guadalajara and Monterrey airports asking travelers to arrive several hours in advance.

Some "residual problems" causing delays also persist in Sydney, Australia, and "five flights" operated by low-cost carrier Jetstar in Japan will continue to be affected this Saturday.

CrowdStrike said the situation could take a few days to return to normal.

An unprecedented computer glitch that raises questions about the worldwide reliance on Microsoft

"The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and it will certainly go down in history," cybersecurity expert Junade Ali said in remarks reported by AFP. The last glitch, which he said had similar consequences, dates back to 2017.

The faulty update occurred on Thursday at around 7:00 pm GMT, according to Microsoft.

"It's one of the rare occasions when a security software is the cause of such a major outage," said Kayssar Daher, a cybersecurity expert also interviewed by AFP.

The extent of the phenomenon is explained by the fact that "Windows is very widespread and CrowdStrike as well," he added.

Australian authorities warned of an increase in scams and phishing attempts following the computer outage.

The failure, in addition to causing disruptions at airports, affected bank digital services in Kenya and Ukraine.

Mobile phone operators also suffered outages and the customer services of several companies stopped working.

The breakdown also impacted the computer operations of the Paris Olympics the event's organizing committee reported, a week before the opening ceremony on July 26.

However, activities "resumed as normal" Friday afternoon, organizers said.

According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the failure also gave a "seizure" to the automotive industry supply chain.

The global nature of the failure prompted some experts to highlight the fact that so much of the world relies on a single supplier for such diverse services.

"We need to be aware that this type of software can be a common cause of failure for multiple systems at the same time," said software engineering professor John McDermid of the UK's University of York.

"We need to design infrastructures that are resilient to these problems," he added.

The outage also affected Dutch hospitals, the London Stock Exchange and Britain's main rail operator.

In the New York Stock Exchange, CrowdStrike ended Friday down 11.10% and Microsoft was down 0.74%.

Global trading floors retreated due to the failure, and in London and Milan, indexes were unable to show their rate of change for much of Friday.