Several airlines in the USA and Asia announced that they had resumed operations. At Vienna Schwechat Airport, too, everything was running smoothly again on Friday evening, and hospitals in Austria had already largely given the all-clear on Friday afternoon.
At Berlin Airport, check-in was “running smoothly” again, a BER spokesman told the AFP news agency on Saturday when asked. According to Thailand’s national airport director Keerati Kitmanawat, there are currently “no long queues at the airports like we saw yesterday.” In Australia, too, operations were largely back to normal, although Sydney Airport was still reporting flight delays.
Check-in services have been restored at airports in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and in India, Indonesia and at Changi Airport in Singapore, check-in services were largely back to normal as of Saturday afternoon (local time).
“Bottlenecks still exist”
According to a senior US government official, “flight operations have resumed across the country, although bottlenecks remain.”
The glitch hit companies around the world that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system on Friday. According to the US cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, the cause was a faulty update to their anti-virus program Falcon. The impact was enormous: airlines and airports around the world had IT problems, so that some take-offs and landings had to be cancelled. Hospitals had to postpone operations, television stations could not broadcast, and cash register systems in supermarkets failed.
The full extent of the disruption impact is not yet known, but reports from the Netherlands and the UK suggest that health services may also have been affected.
Sky with difficulties
Media companies also had to deal with the consequences of the outage: British news channel Sky News said the disruption had ended its news broadcasts on Friday morning. Australian broadcaster ABC also reported significant difficulties.
Meanwhile, the company CrowdStrike announced that it had found a solution to the problem. Company boss George Kurtz told the US news channel CNBC that he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person who was affected.” It could take a few days until operations are back to normal.
According to cybersecurity expert Junade Ali from the British Engineering and Technology Association, the scale of the outage is “unprecedented”. The glitch will “undoubtedly go down in history”. According to him, the last time a similar major outage occurred was in 2017.