‘Largest IT outage’ ever hits Microsoft systems at airports, banks, hospitals

United Airlines’ ground stop has been lifted for all airports, according to an Air Traffic Control System Command Center advisory.

Earlier Friday, the airline had resumed some flights but told CNBC it expected “schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday.”

— Ece Yildirim

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that he expects the transportation delays to be smoothed out and “resembling normal” by Saturday.

“The issue has been identified. It’s really a matter of the kind of ripple or cascade effects as they get everything in their networks back to normal,” Buttigieg said. “These flights, they run so tightly, so back-to-back that even after a root cause is addressed, you can still be feeling those impacts throughout the day.”

Buttigieg added that there is no indication on any impact to the Department of Transportation’s own systems including air control, but that he is expecting more issues on the airlines’ side.

“We’re tracking all of the various impacts hitting different forms of transportation. The one that I think most people are likely to experience directly is those airline cancellations and delays if you’re planning to fly today,” Buttigieg said.

Nearly 28,000 flights had been delayed globally as of about 11 a.m. ET Friday, with roughly 4,700 of those delays within, into or out of the United States, according to FlightAware data. More than 2,950 flights have been cancelled, with almost 1,800 of them U.S. flights.

— Ece Yildirim

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote in a post on X that Friday’s incident was not related to cybersecurity and that the issue — related to a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts — was identified earlier, with a solution deployed. He added that customers “remain fully protected.”

“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” Kurtz wrote. “We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.”

— Hayden Field

The Federal Reserve said its systems are working amid the global tech outage.

“Critical Federal Reserve Systems are operating normally. We are monitoring the situation and working closely with industry and other government agencies to assess the situation,” the central bank said in a statement to CNBC.

— Leslie Picker

Charles Schwab, which operates trading services including Think or Swim, said in a Friday X post that “certain online functionality may be intermittently slow or unavailable.”

“Please do not place trades twice, as duplicate trades may be created,” Charles Schwab said in a message sent to account holders through the Charles Schwab app. “We’re actively working with the vendor to resolve the issue. Phone services may be disrupted and hold times may be longer than usual.”

— Jordan Novet

Railroad Union Pacific is seeing “varying levels of impact” across its network, the company told CNBC in a statement, with back-up protocols enabling communication between teams and dispatchers.

“We are doing everything possible to keep freight moving, but there have been some processing delays in customer shipments as we address targeted areas impacted on our network,” Union Pacific said.

Other major railroad companies Norfolk Southern, BNSF and CSX told CNBC they were unaffected. A BNSF representative told CNBC that it will continue to monitor the situation for potential impacts.

— Ece Yildirim and Lori Ann LaRocco

FedEx said it’s experiencing “substantial disruptions” due to the global tech outage. UPS is also reporting an impact, according to statements from the companies.

FedEx said that there could be delays for package deliveries that were expected to arrive Friday, but the shipping company is attempting to mitigate impacts. The company has activated contingency plans to address the disruption throughout its networks, according to the statement.

UPS also said there may be service delays, as it works to resolve all issues. The software outage is impacting some UPS computer systems in the U.S. and Europe, but the company’s airline and driver delivery systems are still operating effectively, according to the statement.

DHL, for its part, said in a statement the outage currently had “only very limited and local impact.” DHL also said that some suppliers and business partners are affected, and that it’s monitoring the situation.

— Justine Fisher

Amazon’s cloud computing service alerted its customers to some “connectivity issues and reboots” that may be experienced as a result of the CrowdStrike outage.

AWS services “continue to operate normally,” but some “Windows Instances, Windows Workspaces and Appstream Applications” that use CrowdStrike encountered issues early Friday morning, according to a notice on AWS’ service dashboard.

The company provided users with a number of recovery options to bring their applications back online, including to “delete the CrowdStrike Falcon agent file on the affected” instance, or server.

— Annie Palmer

President Biden has been briefed on the global outage, and the administration is in touch with both CrowdStrike and impacted entities, according to a White House official.

“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,” the official said.

— Hayden Field

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s working with CrowdStrike, Microsoft and government agencies to evaluate the outage. 

“The Department, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (@CISAgov) are working with CrowdStrike, Microsoft and our federal, state, local and critical infrastructure partners to fully assess and address system outages,” the department said in a post on X.

— Sean Conlon

The Mount Sinai Health System in New York City said Friday that it has “identified and isolated” systems that have been affected by the disruption. The health system is made up of eight hospital campuses and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The organization’s technology team is actively working to restore impacted systems, it said.

“Patient safety remains our top priority and we will provide updates as the situation evolves,” Mount Sinai said in a statement to CNBC. “We are thankful to our staff who are working to ensure care continues with minimal interruption.”

The University of Miami Health System, which operates several hospitals in South Florida, on Friday said it is experiencing “connectivity issues across various applications,” including its electronic medical record system. The global outage did not compromise its data security and confidentiality, the health system said in a Facebook post. 

All University of Miami hospitals and clinics will remain open, but patients should expect delays until systems are fully restored, according to the post. Impacted facilities are using paper orders to distribute information.

The University of Miami’s information technology team “is actively working to resolve the disruption and bring all systems back online,” the post added. 

UVA Health, a health system associated with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said in a statement Friday that it is operating on a “modified schedule” due to the global outage. Most ambulatory clinics will be closed.

Other clinics are also closed as of Friday morning but may reopen, according to the UVA website.

UVA Health operates an academic medical center, three community hospitals, a specialty rehabilitation hospital and primary and specialty care clinics throughout Virginia.

Penn Medicine in Pennsylvania said it may have to cancel and reschedule appointments in some locations because of the outage, according to an alert on its website. The health system said its hospitals are staffed and continuing to provide care to patients.

“We are making every effort to contact patients whose appointments need to be canceled,” Penn Medicine said.

The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio told CNBC that patient care is not affected by the outage, but some of its tech has been impacted. The health system said it is continuing to provide care at all locations.

– Annika Kim Constantino, Ashley Capoot

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said that the company was working aggressively with every customer to fix outages, but said that because of idiosyncrasies with each corporate network, the repair speed would vary.

“We’re working individually with each and every customer to make sure we can get them up and running,” Kurtz said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

Kurtz sidestepped a question about the legal risk to the company should customers opt to sue. Kurtz noted that he has been in cybersecurity “for a long time” and that CrowdStrike has a strong reputation and level of trust with customers.

— Rohan Goswami

New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq officials said the exchanges are up and running Friday.

“NYSE markets are fully operational and we expect a normal open this morning,” a spokesperson for the exchange said Friday.

The Nasdaq said its European markets and US pre-market are operating normally. “We expect our US markets to open normally,” the firm said.

— Jeff Cox

Passengers at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport faced flight delays as part of the major worldwide IT outage.

Several airlines had requested assistance early Friday with ground stops for their fleets until issues were resolved, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said they were resuming some flights. But they warned of delays, and both Delta and United issued waivers to allow customers to change their travel plans.

Read the full story here.

— Kevin Breuninger and Michele Luhn

Two South African lenders said they have wholly resumed services that were temporarily affected by the ongoing global cyber outage.

“Phew! That was rough, but all of our services are now back up and running,” retail bank Capitec said in a social media update, after alerting customers it was experiencing “nationwide service disruptions” earlier in the day because of “an unexpected issue with an international service provider.”

Its card payments and ATM were not impacted at the time.

Absa Group also said that “the technical matter relating to the global outage has been resolved” with respect to its own services, after flagging difficulties a few hours prior.

“Absa’s digital banking channels, point-of-sale services and ATMs are all functional and available for you to continue banking,” it noted on social media platform X.

— Ruxandra Iordache

Mass General Brigham is canceling all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits on Friday “due to the severity” of the global IT outage, the integrated healthcare system said in a post on X.

It added that its clinics and emergency departments are still open for urgent health concerns and patients already receiving care. The system has “dedicated every available resource to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our patients.” 

Mass General Brigham operates two of the U.S.’s top-ranked hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, along with several other clinics and labs.

— Annika Kim Constantino

The MTA said that train and bus service was unaffected by the outage, but that some customer-facing systems were down and that passengers should follow instructions from crew and in the station.

– Rohan Goswami

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised Friday for the systems update that caused a global IT outage, telling NBC “we’re deeply sorry.”

Businesses are still reeling, with many flights grounded and payments systems downed after the cybersecurity giant’s antivirus software update went awry.

“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” he told NBC’s “Today”.

The CEO reiterated that it was not a security incident or cyberattack, and that the company is working with customers to get them back online.

He said the update was normal and part of the firm’s routine process to prevent security risks. However, he noted that a thorough investigation would need to be carried out into what went wrong.

“We have to go back and see what happened here. But if there’s a negative interaction with the way some of these operating systems work — in this particular case, it was, it was only a Microsoft operating system that was impacted — you’ll see a reaction like this,” he said.

– Karen Gilchrest

Britain’s Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford has declared a “critical incident” due to external IT issues that are affecting its services, as well as Varian — the IT system that it deploys for radiotherapy treatments.

A critical incident can be declared when hospitals and staff face extraordinary pressures.

The institution said that it is now able to deliver radiotherapy services, but it has had to reschedule appointments due to take place this morning. The disruptions may affect appointments into next week, Royal Surrey noted.

— Ruxandra Iordache