Airlines, banks, TV channels and other business across the globe were scrambling yesterday to deal with one of the biggest IT crashes over the past few years, caused by an update to an antivirus software.
Aviation officials in the US briefly grounded all planes, while airlines elsewhere canceled or delayed flights, as systems running Microsoft Windows crashed.
Microsoft said the issue began at 7pm GMT on Thursday, affecting users of its Azure cloud platform running cybersecurity software CrowdStrike Falcon.
Photo: AFP
“We recommend customers that are able to, to restore from a backup from before this time,” the US software giant said in a technical update on its Web site.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on several social media platforms said that a fix had been rolled out for the problem, describing it as a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
Experts suggested applying the fix would not be straightforward.
The global nature of the failure prompted some commentators to question the reliance on a single provider for such a variety of services.
Shares in CrowdStrike slumped by 20 percent in premarket trading.
From Amsterdam to Zurich, Singapore to Hong Kong, airport operators flagged technical issues that were disrupting their services.
Some airports told planes they could not land, while in others airline staff began checking in passengers manually.
“I’m just in limbo as to how long I’ve got to wait here,” traveler Alexander Ropicano told reporters as he waited at Sydney Airport in Australia.
The 24-year-old, flying to Brisbane to see his girlfriend, said the airline told him to “wait until the system is operational again.”
The US Federal Aviation Administration in a notice to airlines early yesterday said that all flights “regardless of destination” were to be grounded.
However, American Airlines later said that as of 9am GMT “we have been able to safely re-establish our operation.”
“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the airline said.
Major airports including Berlin, which had suspended flights earlier yesterday, said departures and arrivals were gradually resuming.
Meanwhile, Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport said its airline systems got disrupted.
Airlines including AirAsia X, Tigerair Taiwan, Jetstar Airways, HK Express Airways, Jeju Air and Scoot were affected by the technical issue, the airport said.
Airline staff resorted to conducting passenger registration and seat allocation procedures manually, after Microsoft cloud-based booking-management system Navitaire was impacted by the outage, airport authorities said.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs issued a statement saying the ministry “inspected the status and operations of critical government information systems,” including the household registration and tax systems, as soon as the technical issue was discovered.
Critical government information systems were not affected and were operating normally, although some personal computers had malfunctioned, the ministry said.
Additional reporting by CNA
A signaling system malfunction disrupted high-speed rail (HSR) services beginning at 8am today, with trains temporarily reduced to three northbound and three southbound trains per hour as authorities conduct inspections. The malfunction occurred on a section of track in Miaoli County during pre-operation checks early this morning, forcing northbound and southbound trains to use a single track, the HSR operator said. The regular schedule has been replaced with three hourly trains offering only nonreserved seating in each direction, stopping at every station, it said, adding that business class cars would still have reserved seating. Departures from terminal stations are scheduled at the top
Taiwan is still in the process of assessing the possibility of recruiting workers from Eswatini, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday, adding that its goal is to help Eswatini upgrade its vocational training centers. If there are plans to recruit workers from Eswatini, safeguarding national security, protecting public health and ensuring the employment rights of Taiwanese would be prerequisites, Department of West Asian and African Affairs Director-General Yen Chia-liang (顏嘉良) told a news conference. Key considerations would also include filling labor shortages in specific industries, and fostering bilateral professional and technical exchanges, he said. Yen was asked about the progress of labor
A US uncrewed surface vessel (USV) encountered multiple Chinese warships during an autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait, US defense company Seasats said in a statement on Wednesday. Seasats announced that a Lightfish USV had completed the first autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait. Over five days, the USV traversed the entire length of the Strait while constantly monitoring surface vessel traffic, the company said. The Lightfish encountered multiple Chinese warships, one of which was a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Type 056 corvette, it said. The Chinese vessels were operating “well within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone without transmitting their identity via the
VERBOSE VESSELS: A CGA cutter and a China Coast Guard exchanged verbal barbs for more than a day in Taiwanese-controlled waters before the Chinese vessel left The Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards had a standoff near the strategically located Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the north of the South China Sea, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The two sides engaged in intense radio exchanges over sovereignty claims during the 33-hour standoff. China Coast Guard vessel 3501 eventually left the restricted waters, 26.6 nautical miles (49.2km) west of the Pratas Islands, at 5pm yesterday, the CGA said. Lying approximately between southern Taiwan and Hong Kong, the Taiwan-controlled Pratas are seen by some security experts as vulnerable to Chinese attack due to their distance — more than
RSS