The U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike issued a faulty software update to computers with Microsoft Windows on Friday, grounding flights and causing major issues at airports worldwide.
JFK and LaGuardia were among the airports where the massive Internet disruption left people stranded, the New York Post reported.
“Microsoft said the underlying cause of the global outage had been fixed as of early Friday — but the impact of cybersecurity outages was continuing to affect some Office 365 apps and services,” the article stated.
The problem also disrupted businesses and services all over the world, hitting banks, television stations, and hotels, according to Breitbart News:
Cybersecurity officials have stated that the issues are not believed to be the result of a malicious cyberattack. Instead, the problems stem from a misconfigured or corrupted update pushed out by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike to its customers. The incident appears to only be affecting devices running the Windows operating system.
During a Friday interview on Today, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company was “deeply sorry” for the problems the issue caused. When asked why a single software bug could have such an effect, Kurtz said that there was a complexity to cybersecurity, and his team was “always trying to stay one step ahead of the adversaries”:
Airlines such as American, Delta, and United grounded flights as a result of the issue while Australian news outlets were shoved off the air for several hours, the Post report said.
Video footage shows a crowd of Delta customers standing in line at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, according to Fox 5 Washington, DC:
“Hospitals and doctors’ offices in the UK had problems with their appointment systems,” the Post noted. “Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, while Israel said its hospitals and post office operations were disrupted.”
