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Sachi Wani

Microsoft outage cripples industries; airports ground to halt



One of the biggest IT crashes on Friday was due to a faulty software update, affecting almost all the sectors including the financial industry, aviation, public transport, corporates, media broadcasting, and hospitality. Some experts called it the largest IT outage in history. 

 

Over 5,000 global flight cancellations were reported by an aviation analytic firm, FlightAware. Major airports from Los Angeles to Singapore also experienced delays due to outages. Hospitals could not access scheduled appointments and patient records in several countries.


Disturbances were seen in countries such as Kenya, Ukraine, and Australia, impacting everything from supermarkets and mobile phone services to media companies. 

 

The outage came as CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, experienced major disruption in its recent update. It took the firm around one and half hours to fix the bug but the problem persisted much longer than that.

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