Worldwide IT Outage Affects Airlines, Supermarkets, and Communication Services
A major IT outage has been reported today, causing disruptions across various industries such as airlines, supermarkets, banking, and communication services. The outage has also affected crucial services such as the NHS and trains.
The cause of the outage has been identified by CrowdStrike, a company that provides cyber attack monitoring and protection to many major businesses. According to the company, the problem was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”. They have reassured that the issue is not a security incident or cyber attack.
Sky News has been closely monitoring the situation, tracking flight delays and cancellations, reports of service outages, and Google searches to determine when the problems first started to arise.
Airlines
The first signs of trouble in the UK were from users of airline services, including Ryanair, British Airways, and WizzAir. Many air travelers were affected as they were up early to catch their flights. The issues with checking in caused additional stress and panic. Reports first started coming in at around 7am, peaking at 8:30am. As of late afternoon, users were still reporting issues, although at a lower rate compared to the morning. According to Downdetector, a website that records IT service and connectivity issues, Ryanair had the highest number of outage reports. At around 10:30am, over 90% of flights from major UK airports were either delayed or cancelled. This trend continued through the afternoon, with a quarter of total flights out of Edinburgh and over 90% of flights out of Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, being affected. The average delay at Heathrow was nearly an hour and at Edinburgh, it was almost an hour and a half. Passengers at airports across Europe, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Stuttgart, and Naples, also experienced major disruptions. About half of the issues reported by Ryanair users were related to check-in, while the rest were split between website and app problems. Similarly, for British Airways, over three-quarters of the outage reports were connected to check-in. More people experienced issues with the Wizz Air app.
Banking
Reports about banking services, such as Visa and Mastercard, and individual banks, such as Nationwide and Lloyds, also started coming in early in the morning, at around 7am, peaking at 8am. The disruptions continued throughout the day, although at lower levels compared to the morning as users found workarounds or resolved the issues. Visa appears to have been the worst affected, with the issues evenly split between purchases and payments. Nationwide also experienced issues with online banking, with two-thirds of reports citing this problem.
Supermarkets
Reports of issues from supermarkets started coming in at around 9am, peaking at 10am. Although there have been fewer reports from supermarkets like Waitrose and Lidl compared to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, it does not necessarily mean they were less affected. It could simply be a reflection of the fact that more people use services from Britain’s two biggest supermarkets. Most of the reports, about three-quarters in total across all supermarkets, were related to checkout. Website issues and order tracking were responsible for the remaining reports. So far, there have been fewer reports of issues related to supermarket apps, but this could also be due to the usage patterns of users, rather than the apps being immune to the outage.
Communication Services
Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 were among the most affected services, with a surge of reports at 8am as people attempted to log in to check emails or messages. The number of error reports reduced throughout the day, as many Teams users approached the end of their work week. There was also a slight increase in reported issues with other communication channels, including WhatsApp and O2. Most of the problems reported with WhatsApp were related to sending messages, while 70% of the issues reported with O2 were due to a lack of signal, and 16% were related to mobile internet. The majority of the problem reports for Microsoft 365 were related to issues with server connection, while 22% were related to login problems, and 20% were related to OneDrive. Many people first noticed issues with their Microsoft products when they encountered the “blue screen of death” on their computer monitors. Google searches for the term “blue screen” reached their highest level in five years today, with searches peaking at 7:15am UK time. People from Australia, China, India, and North America were among the most frequent searchers for the term. In the past 24 hours, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia have shown the most interest in the term, possibly because they were more likely to be awake when the problems first began.
The internet monitoring company Thousand Eyes provided an alive map, showing that applications and networks have reported
