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Several airlines face global ground stop and services disrupted worldwide in wake of major Microsoft Outage

FILE - An American Airlines plane at LaGuardia Airport's Terminal B, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, in New York. American Airlines reports earnings on Thursday, April 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)

(WJET/WFXP) — Several airlines and multiple services worldwide saw major disruptions in the wake of a major Microsoft and Crowdstrike outage. Around 7 a.m., Microsoft 365 said they had released a fix for the update that had caused the disruptions.

All the flights that were affected by the outage have since returned to normal service.

United said in a statement that “A third-party software outage impacted computer systems worldwide, including at United. We are resuming some flights but expect schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday. We have issued a waiver to make it easier for customers to change their travel plans via United.com or the United app.”

Over in Australia, many of their flights were also affected and even saw issues in their banks amid the outage.

CrowdStrike has confirmed that the outage was not caused by any cyberattack but was caused by a defect in a single content update.

A statement from George Kurtz, president and CEO of Crowdstrike, reads:

Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.

We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.

As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts.

For the latest information that we will continuously update, please refer to the CrowdStrike website, my posts on LinkedIn, and my posts on X.  I will continue to provide updates to our community and the industry as they become available.

The grounding is connected to a major service outage with Microsoft, causing disruptions worldwide. Systems worldwide had been affected with reports of major issues in hospitals, 911 call centers, airports, ports, and more.

Major cybersecurity platform CrowdStrike provides advanced cybersecurity solutions to Windows PC are also facing outages, which have logged users out of systems.

More information will be provided as it is received.