A technology issue that started late Thursday sparked a widespread outage impacting airports, businesses and broadcasters across the globe.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco International Airport confirmed it was experiencing an airport-wide tech issue. It was not immediately known if flights were grounded at the airport.
NBC News reports flights were grounded in several countries. In addition, stores and broadcasters in several countries were offline after the outage, which appeared to be affecting Windows PCs.
The incident also impacted NBC Bay Area and other local media companies from broadcasting live newscasts.
The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta. Some banks were also reportedly impacted by the outage.
What caused the massive IT outage?
The massive outage carried into Friday and appears to be linked to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Many users reported encountering the so-called “blue screen of death” on their computers when the outage occurred.
CrowdStrike acknowledged late Thursday it was investigating the issue. CNBC reported CrowdStrike was in the process of rolling back an update that caused the issue.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said its cloud services have been mostly restored after suffering an outage.
According to CNBC, the U.S. tech giant said late Thursday customers in the Central U.S. region may experience issues with multiple Azure services and its Microsoft 365 suite of apps. This could include “failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services.”
“We are aware of the issue affecting a subset of customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson said to NBC News. “We acknowledge how impactful this is to our customers, and we are working to restore services for those still experiencing disruptions as quickly as possible.”
It is not clear whether the Microsoft outage was linked to the CrowdStrike incident.
Harlotte Graham-McLay with the Associated Press contributed to this report.
