PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A global technology outage grounded flights and knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world, including flights at Philadelphia International Airport.
Lines snaked around the Terminal D check-in area early Friday morning as many flights were canceled, leaving travelers stranded and frustrated. Passengers for United, Delta and Spirit airlines waited a long time to check in, if they could at all.
As of 1 p.m., 90 flights in and out of Philadelphia were canceled and 150 were delayed.
Many passengers didn’t know their flights were affected until they arrived at the airport.
“We came up from Atlantic City at 5 o’clock in the morning to catch our flight and not gotten any word that we could have turned around and stayed in our hotel or something in advance. So now we’re sitting there in the airport,” said Tracy, who was supposed to fly back home to Denver.
Communication was also an issue. PHL spokesperson Heather Redfern said the big boards at the airport did not reflect new delays or cancelations. The timestamp was stuck at 1:02 a.m. for about seven hours.
“You don’t find out until you get up to the counter or they shout it,” Tracy added. “All the things on the wall that you normally count on to tell you what’s going on are still telling you everything is on time. I’m still getting text messages saying that my flight is on time.”
As day became night at the airport, passengers there were either arriving to delayed flights or had been there for hours waiting for their flights to leave.
Milton Flores said he was supposed to be traveling to Puerto Rico with his family when the delays grinded plans to a halt.
“I get here [at] 5:30, go to the gate, and no notification at all saying our flight was canceled," he said. "[It] took us about an hour to get here."
Another passenger, Moshua Loriel, was supposed to be flying back home to Atlanta.
"I was flying with Frontier. At first they couldn’t find a pilot... so we boarded the plane, then the pilot never showed up," she said. "They de-planed us and then they delayed it and then they canceled it. So I'm just stuck in Philly now.”
George Gallows, who arrived from the West Coast to pick up his daughter, said he's been in and out of airports since last night. He'd seen the computer issues cripple flight crews on at least one plane he was supposed to take.
"At first they told us that the software wouldn’t allow them to take off,” Gallows said of one experience.
Jonathan, who was traveling to Las Vegas with his wife, expressed disappointment that the airlines didn't seem prepared to operate without the technology affected by the outage.
"The powers that be should have been better prepared. They should’ve had a solution," he said. "They should have had a backup, and they didn’t.”
In the end of the day, some 200 flights were delayed because of the outage, and the airport said it expected its effects to linger throughout the weekend.
City services, hospitals, banks impacted
Philadelphia courts are closed due to the outage. All cases that were set for Friday will be rescheduled. People can request new dates online starting on Monday. Anyone who was scheduled to report to jury duty Friday is excused.
Some area hospitals are affected as well. Main Line Health said it is having issues with computer and phone systems, so elective procedures have been paused. However, the hospital said it is not diverting patients to other hospitals.
Temple Health said its systems were not affected.
Penn Medicine may cancel or reschedule some outpatient appointments and procedures on Friday. A spokesperson added, “Our hospitals, including our emergency departments, are fully staffed and continuing to care for patients. Penn Medicine locations are using well-established ‘downtime’ procedures where necessary.”
In a short statement released by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, it said the global disruption had "minimal impact" on its patients and clinical operations, but that a "few, select systems" experienced disruptions.
Financial institutions like TD Bank are affected. It said it is working to "restore all online banking and other impacted systems." For immediate banking needs, TD customers are advised to visit their local bank or ATM.
Some emergency call centers report outages
Many 911 operators in counties like Bucks in Pennsylvania and Monmouth in New Jersey had to work by hand because dispatch computers had the same "blue screen of death" seen at airports and offices all over the world.
In Gloucester County, four hours went by before things returned to normal. However, 911 remains operational and people are still encouraged to call if they need help.
Officials in some other U.S. states, including Alaska, Virginia and Iowa, also warned of problems with 911 emergency call centers in their areas.
What caused the outage?
The outage caused by a faulty software update grounded flights, knocked banks and media outlets offline, and disrupted hospitals, small businesses and other services on Friday, highlighting the fragility of a digitized world dependent on just a handful of providers.
The trouble with the update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and affecting computers running Microsoft Windows was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologized and said a fix was on the way.
But hours later, the disruptions continued — and escalated.
Long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at a time when many travelers are heading away on summer vacations. Hospitals and doctors' offices had problems with their appointment systems and canceled non-urgent surgeries. Several TV stations in the U.S. were also prevented from airing local news early Friday.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former Head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre.
Cyber expert James Bore said real harm would be caused by the outage because systems people have come to rely on at critical times are not going to be available. Hospitals, for example, will struggle to sort out appointments and those who need care may not get it — and it will lead to deaths, he said.
“All of these systems are running the same software," Bore said. "We’ve made all of these tools so widespread that when things inevitably go wrong — and they will, as we’ve seen — they go wrong at a huge scale."
Microsoft spokesperson Frank X. Shaw confirmed in an emailed statement that “a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of Windows systems globally." Earlier, the company had posted on the social media platform X that it was working to “alleviate impact” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
During an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized for the outage, saying the company was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies.”
“We know what the issue is” and are working to remediate it, Kurtz said.
“It was only the Microsoft operating system” that was affected, though it didn’t happen on every Microsoft Windows system, he said.
Vulnerability in the digital age
Rob D’Ovidio, a professor of criminology at Drexel University, researches high-tech crime and, while this is a rare occurrence, he said events like this highlight how fragile our digital network can be.
“I think it speaks to a larger issue that we need contingency plans in place that allow us to continue business operations,” he said.
D’Ovidio noted we’re lucky this wasn’t a cyberattack.
“If this happens to be an attack, you would still get that annoyance. You would still get that inconvenience — coupled with the fear that we’re under attack, essentially,” he said.
“I think our adversaries could be watching saying, all right, this wasn’t an attack, but look at the impact that it’s having. The hysteria of the public outcry. That adds to the overall impact of the incident.”
Although this was an automatic update glitch, D’Ovidio does not recommend turning off automatic updates on your devices. Instances like this one are still very rare, he stressed, and those updates exist to protect users.
What else is affected by the outage?
Broadcasters go dark, surgeries delayed, ‘blue screens of death’
The White House said President Joe Biden was briefed on the outage and his team has been touch with the company and other impacted entities.
New Zealand's acting prime minister, David Seymour, said on X that officials in the country were “moving at pace to understand the potential impacts,” adding that he had no information indicating it was a cybersecurity threat.
The issue was causing “inconvenience" for the public and businesses, he added.
On the Milan stock exchange, the FTSE MIB index of blue-chip Italian stocks could not be compiled for an hour, though trading continued.
Major delays reported at airports grew on Friday morning, with most attributing the problems in booking systems of individual airlines.
In the U.S., airlines United, American and Delta said that at least some flights were resuming after severe disruptions, though delays would persist.
Airlines and railways in the U.K. were also affected, with longer than usual waiting times.
In Germany, Berlin-Brandenburg Airport halted flights for several hours due to difficulties in checking in passengers, while landings at Zurich airport were suspended and flights in Hungary, Italy and Turkey disrupted.
The Dutch carrier KLM said it had been “forced to suspend most” of its operations.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport warned that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The chaotic morning coincided with one of the busiest days of the year for Schiphol.
Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled — although flights were still operating. Meanwhile, passengers stood in long lines at Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport after flights were cancelled following a global power outage.
In New England, the outage led to delays at airports and for some hospitals to cancel appointments.
At Mass General Brigham, the largest health care system in Massachusetts, all scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits were canceled Friday because of the outage, according to a spokesperson. Emergency departments remain open and care for patients in the hospital has not been impacted.
Australia is particularly affected
While the outages were being experienced worldwide, Australia appeared to be severely affected by the issue. Disruption reported on the site DownDetector included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.
National news outlets — including public broadcaster ABC and Sky News Australia — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels for hours. Some news anchors went on air online from dark offices, in front of computers showing “blue screens of death.”
Hospitals in several countries also reported problems.
Britain’s National Health Service said the outage caused problems at most doctors’ offices across England. NHS England said in a statement said the glitch was affecting the appointment and patient record system used across the public health system.
Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, but emergency care was unaffected.
Shipping was disrupted too: A major container hub in the Baltic port of Gdansk, Poland, the Baltic Hub, said it was battling problems resulting from the global system outage.
Paris Olympic delegations' arrivals are delayed
Paris Olympics organizers say some Olympic delegations’ arrivals, as well as the delivery of some uniforms and accreditations, have been delayed because of the outage.
The organizers said in a statement that ticketing and the torch relay haven't been affected.
“Our teams have been fully mobilized to ensure the continuity of operations at optimum levels,” organizers said.
Ticket sales for Universal Studios Japan affected
Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, western Japan, said the global system outage that started Friday will continue to affect ticket sales at the park over the weekend.
The park said its ticket booths sales will not be available Saturday and Sunday and asked visitors to purchase their tickets on the USJ official website or via designated ticket sales site Lawson Ticket. Park attractions aren't affected.
New York says it couldn't process DMV transactions online
The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles says the internet outage was preventing it from processing transactions online and in its offices Friday morning.
By Friday afternoon, the agency said some systems had been restored and that it could begin performing online transactions. However, some in-person services were still offline.
At least three of its DMV offices closed for the day because of the outage, according to the agency’s website.