Global Cyber Outage Grounds Flights, hits Media, Financial, Telecoms

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off were related to an earlier Microsoft cloud outage.

The Cyprus Mail was also one of the affected companies, with problems related to internet connectivity and other server issues impacting the company on Friday. The Mail apologises for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we are doing our best to provide the best coverage possible under the circumstances.

In Australia, media, banks and telecoms companies suffered outages, which the government said appears to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Crowdsourced website Downdetector showed outages at several banks and telecoms companies.

Crowdstrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday when Reuters contacted its technical support saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor, without mentioning Australia.

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cyber security incident, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X, the social media platform better known as Twitter.

The outages rippled far and wide, with Spain reporting a “computer incident” at all its airports, while Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions which it said would affect “all airlines operating across the network,” though it did not specify the nature of the disruptions.

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in a statement that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and workspaces within AWS.”

It was not immediately clear whether all reported outages were linked to Crowdstrike problems or there were other issues at play.

Earlier, Berlin airport had halted all flights until 10am local time (11am Cyprus time) due to a “technical fault”.

A spokesperson for the airport did not give details about the nature of the problem, which comes amid reports of technical outages affecting some companies around the globe.

A spokesperson for Zurich airport said it was not experiencing problems, but that flights to Berlin were cancelled because BER was not accepting incoming flights until midday local time (1pm Cyprus time).

Source: Cyprus Mail