Global IT outage: Restoration work continues after thousands stranded at airports and hospitals

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Operations are slowly being restored but delays continue for the second day.The biggest IT outage in history” Many regions around the world were thrown into disarray, with thousands of travellers stranded at airports, emergency communications disrupted and blood donation centres unable to access vital supplies.

Airlines, businesses, government agencies, health and emergency services, banks, and schools and universities across the world were shut down or had services disrupted. Flawed software update for the Microsoft Windows operating system, released by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, Experts told CNN,

CrowdStrike CEO said the problem has been resolved, but experts say Reorganizing the systems will be a long process.

According to the report, the disruption affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices, which is less than 1 percent of all Windows machines. saturday blog post From Microsoft. “Although the percentage was small, the widespread economic and societal impacts reflect CrowdStrike’s use by enterprises running many critical services,” Microsoft said.

More than 2,300 flights arriving into the US, departing from the US, or within the US have been tracked, according to tracking website FlightAware. Cancelled More than 6,000 flights were delayed by Saturday afternoon.

More than 3,000 flights were cancelled and over 11,000 were delayed on Friday. FlightAware.com,

Major airlines around the world have said that their services are being restored.

Most of United Airlines’ systems have recovered from Friday’s outage, the airline said A statement said,

“Although most of our systems have recovered from the worldwide third-party software outage, we may still experience some disruption to our operations, including flight delays and cancellations,” United said.

Delta Air Lines “continues to improve its operations” after being forced to halt flights on Friday, according to a report released Saturday. Morning Still, more than 600 Delta flights were canceled on Saturday.

“Additional cancellations are expected as some Delta technology attempts to recover from a vendor-caused issue Friday morning,” the update said.

Jetstar Japan, Hong Kong Express and Cebu Pacific Airlines said on Saturday that their operations were also gradually resuming.

Cybercriminals took advantage of this chaos to promote fake websites loaded with malicious software designed to trick unsuspecting victims. According to the warnings From the US government and many cybersecurity professionals.

Former McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt told CNN that a group of private sector and government agencies worked overnight to “address the threat” and find a solution to the global outage. The call included the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other private and government organizations.

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike I apologized The company on Friday thanked consumers for reporting the issue and said it was working with those affected.

“We understand the severity of the situation and deeply apologize for the inconvenience and disruption,” Kurtz posted on X. “We are working with all affected customers to ensure systems are back up and running and can provide the services their customers have come to expect.”

But that’s easier said than done: Manually restarting individual systems requires time and expertise that some customers don’t have, which is why companies have been slow to recover from outages.

Frustrated travelers lined up at airports over flight cancellations and delays, with some missing important events like funerals and birthdays. Long lines of travelers lined up for help Saturday at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, with many flights still canceled or delayed.

“I had to go to California for my mom’s wedding,” Richard Whitfield, of Pasco County, Florida, told CNN’s Isabel Rosales on Saturday. Whitfield and his partner, Jonathan Shade, left Tampa on Thursday and missed their connecting flight in Atlanta because of bad weather, which delayed their landing and forced the plane to refuel in Tallahassee.

After their rescheduled flight was delayed multiple times on Friday, the couple decided to cancel the trip and return home. But with no flights available to Tampa on Friday night, they spent their second night at an airport hotel. They were unable to get a voucher from Delta for their stay.

“(Richard) was on hold for 24 hours,” Shedd told CNN. “When he finally put his number on the line, it was 2,001.”

View this interactive content on CNN.com

Two hours later, Richard’s spot in Delta Air Lines’ virtual customer service queue was one of 2,300 people, Shedd said. Delta Air Lines reported the most cancellations, with more than 850 Delta and Delta Connection flights unable to depart.

“If we can’t fly, we’ll try for a car, and if we can’t afford a car, we’ll spend another night in a hotel and see what happens,” Shedd said.

Shedd and Whitfield said when they last checked, a rental car fare to Tampa would be $600. They said Amtrak is charging $1,000 for a one-way ticket to Tampa.

Whitfield told CNN that the whole incident has had a huge impact on him. “For me, it has a huge impact on humanity and everything we need to survive: food, sleep or water, shelter,” he said.

After spending 48 hours in Atlanta, they got a flight to Tampa on Saturday evening, which they say they can only hope doesn’t get delayed or canceled. For now, the couple has nothing to do but wait and “have a nice drink,” Shedd and Whitfield said.

In addition to problems at airports, the disruption has also caused delays at hotels and rental car companies. Major hotels, including Marriott International and some Hiltons, were affected by delays in both the payment process and the check-in process.

Even Americans not traveling felt the impact of the power outages in various aspects of their daily lives, including making it difficult in some areas to call 911 during emergencies, get or renew their driver’s licenses, or send or receive packages.

There were reports of disruptions to 911 service in various states including Alaska and cities like Phoenix, where the system was down for hours but was later restored.

Drivers License Office Restaurants were closed or limited service in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia.

Some hospitals had to cancel appointments and surgeries

While most hospitals remained open to treat medical emergencies, some said they had to cancel patient appointments and surgeries due to lack of access to electronic medical records and the inability to order lab tests and prescriptions.

Hospital workers are having a hard time providing necessary care to patients without the technology they rely on.

Kim Brown, a labor and delivery nurse at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, California, was at the end of her shift Thursday night when the hospital’s computer system, on which the care of women in labor and their babies depends, crashed.

“All of our kids get little plastic tags that set off an alarm if they get too close to an exit or an elevator. It went off,” Brown said. “It was upsetting because we had no information. It was just, ‘Oh, OK, everything is out now.'”

The disruption posed a risk to the safety of the newborns, so the hospital stationed security guards near the elevators to keep them safe.

Laura Topete, a nurse in the postpartum care unit at Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, said she faced a roadblock when she tried to get pain medication for a woman in pain after childbirth but couldn’t see the doctor’s orders to see what type of medication she could get.

“The patient had to endure the pain for longer than necessary,” Topete said.

Epic Systems, a company that makes widely used electronic health records systems for hospitals and doctors’ offices, said Friday that its Nebula cloud-based platform was affected by an overnight outage and that some services, including telehealth visits, were unavailable during the outage. Veradigm, another electronic medical records company, also said its systems were affected by the CrowdStrike outage.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it is working with federal, state, local and private sector partners “to assess the impact of the CrowdStrike outage on patient care and HHS systems, services, and operations.”

In addition to hospitals, blood donation centers also faced challenges and had to change ways to ship blood because of flight delays. The New York Blood Center, which supplies blood to about 200 hospitals in the Northeast, began emergency driving operations to distribute collected blood. And Blood Assurance had concerns for its planned shipment of at least 20 platelets — disc-shaped pieces that help form clots — because of flight issues.

Government agencies came to a standstill

The effects of the global tech disruption were felt across the US, as countless government agencies waited for services to return to normal.

The mayor of Portland, Oregon, issued an emergency declaration due to the ongoing outage. Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a news release that it affected servers in the city’s data centers, employee computers and single sign-on for cloud services.

In Southern California, the disruption caused connectivity problems at Los Angeles County Superior Court and temporarily limited jail bookings in San Diego County, officials said.

Voting was disrupted at some polling places in Arizona as early voting continued in the state’s primary election, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department. The county is the fourth most populous county in the US and is home to Phoenix, according to the county’s website.

The Social Security Administration closed its local offices to the public on Friday, as power outages knocked out many services. The agency said in a statement that it expects long wait times for the national 800 phone number, and some online services may be unavailable.