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[BREAKING] Global Cyber Outage Grounds Flights And Disrupts Bank & Business Operations

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

Cover image via Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters & Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Major US airlines ordered ground stops on Friday, 19 July, citing communications issues, while other carriers, media companies, banks, and telecoms firms around the world also reported system outages were disrupting their operations

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.

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 telecom 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.

Screen showing an error is seen at a currency exchange store at Hong Kong International Airport amid system outages disrupting the operations in Hong Kong, 19 July.

Image via Tyrone Siu/Reuters

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 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.

AWS cloud service provider said in a statement that it was "investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS".

People wait for their flights as Indian airlines are affected by global IT outage in Bangalore, India on 19 July.

Image via Pranay Bhargava via Reuters

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