A worldwide outage shocked the world today to epic proportions after the world experienced blackness due to a software outage. While we are still uncertain if this was a hack or not, this impacted systems from the Caribbean to the world. It begs to question if this was a test or if was it just a glitch!
The glitch affected key sectors including hospitals, airports, banks, and other sectors.
The number of flights canceled across the world after the major IT disruption has risen to 5,078 – 4.6% of those scheduled – according to the latest update from aviation analytics firm Cirium.
In the UK, 167 departures have been canceled – 5.4% of those scheduled – and 171 arrivals were canceled, the firm says.
Several US airlines, including American, United, and Delta, issued ground stops – an air traffic control measure that slows or grounds aircraft at a given airport – earlier as IT outages disrupted across the globe.
This timelapse from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 below shows just how many flights were impacted.
Payment systems have been among the IT systems impacted by today’s disruption.
Morrisons said this morning it was experiencing “some issues” with payments in some stores, but around 40 minutes after it issued an update saying the problems had been fully resolved.
Posts on social media suggested some Waitrose stores were only taking cash payments for a time this morning.
The supermarket said it was briefly impacted earlier in the day, but it said this was limited to stores being unable to process contactless card payments, with chip and pin and cash payments still possible.
Asda, M&S, Tesco, Lidl, Sainsbury’s, Iceland and Lidl all said their stores operated as normal.
Co-op said it didn’t experience any significant impact, and that cash and card payments were running as normal.
Billboards from New York City’s Times Square, where some billboards went blank during today’s IT outage show black screens and “the blue screen of death” in place of the vibrant advertisements that typically light up the area.
Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, says a “handful” of the more than 100 billboards in the area remained offline earlier on Friday,
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company founded in 2011 to safeguard the world’s biggest companies and hardware from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
It specializes in endpoint security protection and tries to prevent malicious software or files from hitting corporate networks from devices that connect to them, such as phones and laptops.
It also aims to protect the data of companies that have shifted from guarding it under their roof, or on their servers, to so-called cloud providers.
The Texas-based firm was co-founded by entrepreneurs George Kurtz, who remains chief executive, and Dmitri Alperovitch. It listed its shares publicly on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019.
Since it first launched, the company has seemingly played a key role in helping firms investigate cyber-attacks.
In 2016 Crowdstrike was called in by the US Democratic National Committee, the strategy arm of the Democrat Party, to investigate a breach into its computer network.
Ambulance services have recorded higher than normal demand amid the IT outages today.
Some trusts pointed to the disruption suffered by other healthcare services during the IT disruption – GPs and pharmacies have been affected by outages, and some hospital appointments were also postponed.
The North East, South East Coast, South Central, and London ambulance services have all recorded increased demand. The surge in London has been described as “huge”.
Patients with the most serious or life-threatening conditions have been prioritized, with others being warned wait times could be impacted.
Gatwick airport says its IT systems are now operating as normal and it expects the “majority” of flights to operate as usual tomorrow.
“Some delays and cancellations will however continue this evening and over the weekend. We strongly advise passengers to check with their airline for the latest updates,” a spokesperson says.
They add that there will be additional staff in the terminals this evening and some of the shops and eateries will remain open later than normal.
