Global Glitch Grounds Flights, Disrupts Hospitals in Austin and Worldwide

A technical disaster shut down certain Microsoft Windows systems worldwide Friday, and companies are still dealing with the fallout.

“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it's actually happened this time,” said Troy Hunt, an internet security analyst and Microsoft regional director, on social media.

On Wednesday, July 24, the Austin-based tech company responsible for the crashes, CrowdStrike, blamed a bug and said it would take future measures to prevent similar outages.

In some areas, 911 lines were downed and live news broadcasts were cut short, NPR reported. A city spokesperson told the Chronicle the outage didn’t impact 911 lines in Austin, but it did bungle the city’s 311 line and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) for a few hours overnight. Dispatchers had to use radios while staff worked to fix CAD.

A software update to Microsoft Windows systems from CrowdStrike contained a "defect” that caused crashes on Windows hosts, per a statement from the company. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStike said. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Among other disruptions, global banking has been affected, with The New York Times reporting some JPMorganChase employees have been unable to access their computers.

Hospitals across the world have been impacted by the inert blue screen that the glitch caused. BBC reports two-thirds of doctors’ practices in Northern Ireland were affected. In Austin, Baylor Scott & White Health sent the Chronicle a statement confirming that local hospitals are experiencing issues, but "patient care is safely continuing as we work through issues.” The spokesperson did not answer questions about specific impacts. An Ascension Seton spokesperson said their operations were affected as well. "Ascension does not use CrowdStrike for systems that we own and manage, however, some third-parties we work with do." As of Friday afternoon, Ascension had been told CrowdStrike had corrected errors and said "we are hopeful the issue will be resolved quickly."

At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and across the U.S., all flights from several U.S. carriers – including American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines – were grounded early Friday. Nationwide, there were more than 3,270 cancellations and roughly 30,000 delays, according to FlightAware.com. The site tracked at least 17 cancellations and 54 delays at AUS. "The last time we experienced something similar by scale and circumstance was the Southwest network disruption in 2022," an airport spokesperson said.

A city spokesperson told the Chronicle IT systems at AUS itself were not affected (though some concessions at AUS had issues). As of 8:05am all airline ground stops associated with the outage were lifted except for United, which lifted ground stops at 10:01am.

AUS expects continued delays and cancellations due to the global disruption “today, tomorrow, and possibly Sunday.” The airport is asking passengers to double check their flights’ scheduling and arrive to the airport early.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration said on social media that its operations haven’t been affected, but the agency “is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines.”

New York Times tech reporter Adam Satariano told CBS the glitch “shows how interconnected and fragile a lot of the technology infrastructure that’s used around the world is.”