Microsoft IT outage live: Crowdstrike boss ‘deeply sorry’ as airline and hospital chaos could last for days

You can read our full report on the outages here.

Here at Stansted Airport there are large crowds in the departures hall, far greater than we’d expect even for such a busy travel day. The vast majority appear to be at Ryanair where there are long queues for check-in, snaking right through the airport. Ryanair has been reporting problems with online check-in and asking passengers to check-in at the airport if needed, suggesting that they arrive at Stansted three hours before their flight. Security lines are long but moving efficiently; time through security is under 30 mins

Among other things, the CrowdStrike chief executive’s first statement didn’t include an apology. That has led to a range of frustrated reactions from people affected by today’s chaos.

Here’s a long thread from Lulu Cheng Meservey, who previous headed PR at Activision, looking at exactly why the statement didn’t work.

Here are some images from across the world showing the chaos at airports. A number of airlines have been forced to ground planes and cancel flights in response to the problems.

On Reddit and other platforms, some IT admins have said that they have been able to get affected devices to work again simply by turning them off and on again, sometimes repeatedly.

CrowdStrike has recalled the broken update, meaning that any computers that were booted up afterwards should be working. But those that had already downloaded it need to download the fix from CrowdStrike before they will start working again.

The trouble is, of course, that those computers aren’t working enough to get the update. But some have found that repeatedly restarting gives the computer enough time to pull down the fix, and get those devices working again.

Industry expert Adam Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, warned that it could even take “weeks” for all computers and systems to be fully restored.

“The fix will have to be applied to many computers around the world. So if computers are getting blue screens and endless loops, it could be more difficult and take days and weeks,” he said.

“Microsoft Windows isn’t the main OS for mission-critical systems, that’s Linux – and so this could have been much worse.”

Earlier, George Kurtz, the chief executive of CrowdStrike, said that he was “deeply sorry” for the incident but warned that it could be “some time” before systems are restored.

In an interview with NBC’s Today Show in the US, Mr Kurtz said the incident was not a cyber attack, but admitted that despite CrowdStrike identifying the bug which sparked the issue and rolling out a fix, it would still be “some time” before all systems returned to normal.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this,” Mr Kurtz said.

“We’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them – many of our customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said.

“Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were and we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”

Asked if he ever thought an outage of this scale was possible, the CrowdStrike founder added: “Software is a very complex world and there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task.”

“The President has been briefed on the CrowdStrike outage and his team is in touch with CrowdStrike and impacted entities,” a statement from the White House says. “His team is engaged across the interagency to get sector by sector updates throughout the day and is standing by to provide assistance as needed.”

Frank X Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications, has pointed the blame at CrowdStrike.

“Earlier today, a Crowdstrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of Windows systems globally,” he wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”

(Much of the coverage, including ours, has referred to this as a “Microsoft outage” because it affects Windows PCs and it’s a Microsoft error that will appear when it happens. But the issue doesn’t actually appear to be Microsoft’s fault, which is presumably why its statement is so specific in pointing the finger at CrowdStrike.)

More than 100 flights to, from and within the UK have so far been cancelled because of the Crowdstrike IT outage.

The Independent has surveyed the leading British airports – with London Heathrow, Manchester and Edinburgh among the worst hit.

Unusually, though, the latest number of cancellations are on Continental European airlines.

London Heathrow: 58 cancellations British Airways has so far grounded 22 flights, including three round-trip to each of Amsterdam and Edinburgh. Zurich, Geneva and Berlin are also affected. Eurowings – the budget subsidiary of Lufthansa – has grounded 16 Heathrow flights, with round-trip from Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and Stuttgart hit. Lufthansa has grounded a pair of Frankfurt-Heathrow flights. Vueling (Barcelona), Iberia (Madrid), Delta (Atlanta) and Virgin Atlantic (New York JFK) are also affected.

Edinburgh: 26 cancellations Eurowings has grounded flights from Cologne and Dusseldorf, while KLM has cancelled two round-trips from Amsterdam.

Manchester: 12 cancellations Ryanair has grounded flights to Beauvais and Brussels.London Gatwick: 10 cancellations The worst-affected airline so far is Vueling, which has axed flights to and from Florence, Asturias and Paris.

London Stansted: 8 cancellations Ryanair has a six-hour delay on one Berlin flight, and has grounded another flight to Berlin and well as to Dortmund, Zaragoza and Lodz.

London Luton: 8 cancellations Wizz Air grounded flights to Athens, Budapest and Warsaw.

Firms have reported payroll failures after software was impacted by a global IT outage.

The IT outage has resulted in queues and delays at airports, disruption to GP services and payment failures in some shops.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is “actively working” to fix a “defect” in an update for Microsoft Windows users which sparked the outage.

Workers who are paid weekly could also be impacted by the outage, after businesses said their software for payroll was also affected.

Melanie Pizzey, chief executive officer and founder of the Global Payroll Association, said: “We’ve been contacted by numerous clients already today who have been unable to access their payroll software due to the Microsoft outage and others who have been urged to log out with immediate effect.

“Depending on the length of this outage, it could have very serious implications for businesses across the nation, particularly those who process payroll on a weekly basis.

“Furthermore, we could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage.

“At best, it will require those managing payroll to work overtime to rectify the issue, but the good news is that it doesn’t seem to be a cyber attack.”

Some banking services have also been affected, with Barclays bank reporting that its digital investing platform was also suffering disruptions.

A spokesman for the bank said: “All Barclays services are operating as normal at this time other than our digital investing platform Smart Investor, where customers are currently unable to manage their account in the app, Online Banking or over the phone.”

Other payments services, banks and financial institutions sought to reassure customers that their systems were running without disruption.

Link, which runs the UK’s network of ATM cash machines, said its network is “working normally but enhanced monitoring is in place as a precaution.”