Airlines were gradually coming back online on Saturday, after global carriers, banks, and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus programme.
Passengers gathered at airports on Friday to await news as dozens of flights were cancelled and operators scrambled to keep services running after an upgrade to a Microsoft Windows programme crippled systems around the world.
As of Saturday afternoon, multiple US airlines and airports in Asia reported that check-in services had been restored in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Thailand, and that operations were mostly back to normal in India, Indonesia, and Singapore’s Changi Airport.
“The check-in systems have come back to normal (at Thailand’s five major airports). There are no long queues at the airports as we experienced yesterday,” Airports of Thailand president Keerati Kitmanawat told reporters at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok.
Microsoft said the problem originated at 1900 GMT on Thursday and affected Windows customers running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity programme.
CrowdStrike said it had sent out a fix for the vulnerability, and the company’s CEO, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wished to “personally apologise to every organisation, every group, and every person who has been impacted.”.
It also stated that it could take a few days to return to normal. US President Joe Biden’s staff was speaking with CrowdStrike and those affected by the glitch “and is standing by to provide assistance as needed,” the White House said in a statement.
“Our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains,” a senior US administration official said.
According to reports from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the disruption may have had an impact on health services, although the entire extent of the impact is unknown.
Media businesses were also affected, with Britain’s Sky News stating that the issue had ended its Friday morning news broadcasts and Australia’s ABC reporting significant difficulties.
By Saturday, most services in Australia had returned to normal, but Sydney Airport continued to report flight delays.
Following the downtime, Australian officials warned of an upsurge in scams and phishing attempts, such as people offering to help reboot computers and requesting personal or credit card information.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported problems with their digital services, while several mobile phone carriers were disrupted, and customer support in a number of businesses was unavailable.
“The scale of this outage is unprecedented and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017.
While some airports cancelled all flights, others required manual check-ins for passengers, resulting in long lineups and angry tourists.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) first ordered all aircraft halted “regardless of destination,” but airlines subsequently claimed they were resuming operations and working through the backlog.
