Tech

Flights grounded and travelers stranded — including at JFK and LaGuardia — after tech outage cripples banks and other companies around the globe

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5 months ago

July 19, 2024

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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 as of 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.

But hours after the problem was first detected, chaos continued to mount — and only rippled further.

LaGuardia Airport canceled 60 flights and delayed more than 100, while JFK travelers on dozens of flight were also facing lengthy delays and 38 canceled flights.

Long lines were also forming at Big Apple airports and across the country as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at the height of summer travel.

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.

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.”

The effects of the outage and subsequent disruptions were felt widely.

Early Friday, major US airlines — American, Delta and United — were among those to ground flights, while other carriers and airports around the world also reported delays and disruptions.

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