Microsoft IT outage: The key moments on day of global chaos

A number of shops have reported not being able to take card payments amid the worldwide IT outage.

Customers across the country have faced issues with trying to pay using their cards, with some shops putting up “cash only” signs on their doors.

A spokesman for the supermarket Morrisons said there were some “isolated incidents” with payment systems this morning, which have now been resolved and systems are working normally.

There are serious questions of course for CrowdStrike.

But also Microsoft: what due diligence do they perform on third party providers and on individual updates before they're released across their globally dominant system?

Read analysis from Sky News here

Passengers at Gatwick Airport are being checked in manually on specific flights to ease long queues.

The global IT glitch has led to long queues for the check-in desks at the airport, with some passengers standing still for several hours.

In response, airport staff have started to check passengers onto specific flights in order of intended departure time.

One member of staff could be heard shouting “Budapest” amid a large crowd of people urging the relevant passengers to come forward.

Thousands of passengers have suffered flight delays and cancellations on Friday due to the IT outage.

Here are 10 key questions and answers from PA Media on assistance and compensation.

A traveller at Gatwick Airport said there was “confusion” as staff initially tried to charge customers €50 to issue new boarding passes as passengers were unable to access their passes virtually.

Carlos Neto, 38, told the PA news agency his Wizz Air flight to Faro to visit family was scheduled for 7.40am but left at around 9am due to delays caused by the systems failure.

Neto, a dancer from New York, said staff initially told passengers they would be charged €50 to issue new boarding passes, before realising there was an IT issue and issuing boarding passes for free, which “made everyone late”.

He said “the entire system was confusing” to passengers as the departure screen incorrectly said “gate closed” even though the gate was remaining open until all passengers arrived.

He added: “The lines were very long because passengers from other flights were then also delayed. Because no one explained what was happening I think it created more confusion.”

Friday's outage has been described as an unprecedented sign of how exposed services are with a potential overreliance on certain operating systems.

The major disruption could prompt a rethink on whether the most resilient operating systems are being used and whether it is “lazy” to stick with what we know, according to cybersecurity expert Dr Harjinder Lallie.

The associate professor at the University of Warwick described the situation as an IT “catastrophe”.

He told PA: “The worldwide IT outage experienced this morning is unprecedented in the range and scale of systems it has impacted.

“This IT catastrophe highlights the need for greater resilience, a greater focus on back-up systems, and possibly even a need to rethink whether we are using the most resilient operating systems for such critical systems.”

The chief executive of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, confirmed the issue was caused by a “defect in a single content update for Windows hosts”. In short, a flaw in a software update pushed out to customers using Windows PCs.

CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers, providing antivirus and cyberattack prevention tools to businesses.

The flaw in its update caused many Windows PCs to crash, with many displaying the so-called “blue screen of death” and becoming unusable.

IT infrastructure at businesses and institutions around the world collapsed, taking many businesses and their online services offline.

This has particularly impacted the transport, financial and healthcare sectors, with airlines and airports, train services, pharmacies and GP surgeries and even the London Stock Exchange affected.

This remains unclear.

Given the scale of devices and businesses impacted, it could take several days for every impacted computer to be fixed and returned to normal use, particularly at smaller firms with fewer resources.

Cybersecurity experts said it is good news that the issue has only impacted Windows users – CrowdStrike confirmed Apple Mac and Linux users were unaffected – and a fix having been deployed should mean larger IT departments can quickly begin restoring services.

But signs of disruption are likely to remain throughout Friday and into the weekend.

CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said the company would “make sure that every customer is fully recovered” from the ongoing global IT outage.

Speaking to NBC’s Today Show, Kurtz said many firms were rebooting their computers and coming back online, but said it could still be “some time” before all systems had completely recovered.

“We’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them – many of our customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and operational because we fixed it on our end.

“Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover. But it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were. And we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”

Asked if he ever thought an outage of this scale was possible, the CrowdStrike founder said: “Software is a very complex world and there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task.”

Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, part of the UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency, has said the scale of the problem was huge.

"This is not unprecedented, but I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale. It has happened over the years, but this is one of the biggest.

I think it’ll likely be short-lived because the nature of the problem is actually quite simple.

"But it's very, very, very, very, big."

CrowdStrike founder and chief executive George Kurtz said the company was “deeply sorry for impact that we’ve caused to customers” after a flawed software update sparked a global IT outage.

Speaking to NBC’s Today Show in the US, Kurtz said the cybersecurity firm was now “working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online”, confirming a “bug” related to a software update was the cause of the outage.

Kurtz said there had been a “negative interaction” between the update and Microsoft’s operating system, which had then caused computers to crash, sparking the global outage, which remains ongoing.

GP practices across England warned they could not access EMIS Web, the most widely used clinical system for primary care in the UK.

It enables practices to book appointments and examine records, and includes a clinical decision support tool as well as helping with admin.

Holidaymakers whose plans have been disrupted by the global IT outage are being urged to check with their travel insurer to see what they are covered for.

Many families will have plans for getaways with children on their school holidays.

MoneySuperMarket Travel Insurance said that if a policy includes travel disruption cover, it may be possible to claim for disruption or losses incurred as a result of a trip being delayed or cancelled.

This may include alternative accommodation or expenses incurred such as travel, food and drink, possibly stretching to covering the full cost of the holiday if holidaymakers are unable to go.

But the website added not all policies cover this as standard, and cover levels, conditions and exclusions can vary between providers, making it important to check with the insurer as a first port of call.

Before this week, CrowdStrike was known for finding the cause of problems. The company – headquartered in Texas but with a reach across the world – was most famous for having investigated large scale hacks, such as those on Sony Pictures and a run of breaches at the Democratic National Committee that it blamed on Russian spies.

Read more from The Independent here

NHS Blood and Transplant has urged people to keep their blood donor appointments, saying it had been contacted by people wondering if they were going ahead.

“There remains a particularly urgent need for O negative blood. Blood donation systems are not affected and we currently have a high number of appointments available at our donor centres in major towns and cities.”

Elaine Bevan, a retired nurse from Southampton, has been waiting in line at Gatwick Airport for over two hours to check in for her 2pm flight to Orlando, Florida.

The 70-year-old booked the two-week trip with her family in November last year and said she will wait as long as necessary because the holiday has been booked for such a “long time”.

Bevan said: “We’re all getting a bit tired. It took us ages to find the queue in the first place.”

Asked if she was prepared to wait until the evening for the flight, she said: “I think we have to. It’s been booked for a long time."

She asked: “In the world where IT is king, why does it not perform as it should?”

Patients with “minor ailments” are being sent to pharmacies from GP surgeries, according to the chief executive of the Independent Pharmacies Association (IPA).

Dr Leyla Hannbeck said: “As the GP appointment system is down more patients are being referred to pharmacies for minor ailments.

“We are asking the public to be patient if there are delays because these issues are outside of our control and we are doing everything we can to ensure patients receive their medicines and treatments.”

A US tourist paid £5,262 for new flights home from Edinburgh Airport after original plans were cancelled because of the IT outages.

Stephanie Thompson, heading home to Dallas, Texas, said her family, which was in the UK to attend Wimbledon and the Open Championship in Troon, were unable to reach British Airlines or American Airlines for support.

Speaking from Edinburgh Airport, she told the PA news agency: “It was supposed to leave at 9.25am and change in Heathrow at 11 and we were supposed to get into Dallas later today.

“We couldn’t get an answer from anybody. British Airways kept hanging up saying we have too many calls right now. I was on hold with American [Airlines] for about an hour and 10 minutes before I finally hung up.

“We just paid $6,800 for a one-way trip home, hopefully leaving tonight. I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted something to get us home.”

Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident amid the major IT outage.

A statement on its website said the issue affected Varian, the IT system it uses to deliver radiotherapy treatments.

The trust said it had contacted patients who were due to have radiotherapy on Friday morning to reschedule appointments.

An update then said the trust is now able to deliver radiotherapy services on Friday afternoon, with appointments to take place as scheduled.

However, it added " there is still some disruption to the radiotherapy system that may affect appointments running into next week. Please continue to attend your appointment unless you are contacted directly.”

Staff at Stansted Airport are handing out bottles of water to people queuing on the hot July day.

Carol Murphy, 58, who was queuing inside the terminal building for a Ryanair flight to go on a 10-day holiday to Vienna, said the situation was “nobody’s fault”.

“I think [the staff are] doing quite well," said the charity worker, of Ealing, west London.

Student Jack O’Leary, who was queuing for a Ryanair flight to Dublin to go on holiday, said: “We’re quite understanding, it’s a global outage and everything’s pretty chaotic.”

An emergency Cobra meeting was held with officials - rather than ministers - on Friday morning to discuss the IT chaos, Downing Street said.

A Number 10 spokeswoman told reporters: “We recognise the impact this is having on services and the government is working closely with the respective sectors and industries on this issue, which is affecting services not only across the UK but also globally.

“Officials have met in the Cobra unit... this morning and of course are updating ministers regularly on this issue.”

She said she was not aware of plans for a Cobra gathering with ministers present.

Asked why Sir Keir Starmer did not chair the meeting of the committee, she said: “The prime minister’s had bilaterals with [Ukraine's] president Zelensky and cabinet this morning, but all ministers including the prime minister are being kept informed with the latest.”

The spokeswoman also said she is not aware of any government business being hit by the outage.

Microsoft has said the underlying cause of the outage of its 365 apps and services has been fixed, but that the residual impact of the cybersecurity outages is continuing to affect some customers.

British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a weekend, sparking a PR disaster. According to reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.

Meta-owned Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for six hours on 4 October, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on 14 December, 2020. According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the US, UK and India.

Prof Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said any form of IT outage “is a serious concern”.

“Our members are telling us that today’s outage is causing considerable disruption to GP practice bookings and IT systems – practices using EMIS IT systems appear to be particularly affected.

“Any form of disruption to our digital systems is a serious concern for GPs as it directly impacts on the care we can give to our patients. Outages like this affect our access to important clinical information about our patients, as well as our ability to book tests, make referrals and inform the most appropriate treatment plan.”

The global tech outage has affected operations in different sectors internationally.

With the move to the cloud, CrowdStrike's software - which suffered a defect update which sparked the outage - is running on millions of computers around the world.

The US cybersecurity company has more than 20,000 subscription customers globally.

"The damage to business processes at the global level is dramatic," said Omer Grossman, chief information officer at identity security firm CyberArk.

Network Rail said the “vast majority” of the rail network is open despite the IT outage.

A spokesperson said: “The railway’s essential train control, communication and running systems are unaffected by today’s IT issues with the vast majority of the network open and running as normal.

“Some passenger information and train crew roster systems are seeing some impact that may lead to some short notice delays and cancellations.”

The queue snaked outside the main terminal building on Friday morning.

Courtney Kemal, 32, who had already been in the queue for around two hours by late morning, said her two sons, aged five and seven, were “obviously getting stressed”.

The business student, of Romford, east London, said their Ryanair flight taking them on an eight-day holiday to Magaluf was due to leave at 12.40pm and they had arrived at 9am.

She said she had heard “nothing” from the airline and that “we had no warning of this”.

In a statement, Microsoft said a resolution for Windows devices was “forthcoming”.

It said: “We are aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third party software platform. We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.”