Microsoft IT outage live: Airlines, banks and hospital chaos could last for days as CrowdStrike boss apologizes

A worldwide Windows glitch has taken much of the world’s infrastructure offline.

Flights were grounded, and hospitals across the world have reported a variety of problems. TV channels have been taken off air. Everything from banks and payment companies to airlines and train companies said that they would see delays and technical issues.

Eerie scenes played out in New York as giant screens in the world-famous Times Square went dark, and across the US complications with local hospitals and law enforcement services were reported.

The problem is related to a global update sent out by CrowdStrike, a cyber security company that makes a product that aims to keep computers safe.

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz later issued a statement reassuring customers that the outage was not “a security incident or cyber attack.”

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz said, in a statement. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”

According to the aviation analysts at Cirium, one in 25 flights globally had been cancelled on Friday.

President Joe Biden is receiving “constant updates” on the situation, according to a senior administration official.

You can read our full report on the outages here.

Flights have been cancelled and TV stations have been taken online in a drastic computer outage.

According to its website, CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity leader, and “has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk — endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.”