Egypt’s Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouli formed yesterday a crisis cell comprising officials from all ministries and concerned authorities to follow up on repercussions of a global tech outage that hit many airports and other facilities worldwide.
A tech outage hit a number of countries impacting airports, airlines, media, banks and many other facilities across the globe.
Egypt’s Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement yesterday that all Egyptian airports “are operating normally” and no departure flights were affected.
With international airports undergoing tech outages, which have affected the air traffic around the world, the Ministry of Civil Aviation formed a task force to follow up on developments of the situation.
What happened?
A global tech outage disrupted operations in multiple industries yesterday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded flights citing communication problems. The order came shortly after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers, though it was not immediately clear whether those were related.
“A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United. While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports,” United said in a statement. “Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
Australia’s government said outages suffered by media, banks and telecoms companies there appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.
According to an alert sent by Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.
The alert, which was sent at 05:30 GMT yesterday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.
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.
Travel industry hit the hardest
The travel industry was among the hardest hit with airports around the world, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin and several Spanish airports reporting problems with their systems and delays.
International airlines, including Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned of problems with their booking systems and other disruptions.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports from medical officials on X said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters was off air, apologising for being unable to transmit live.
Banks and other financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa warned clients about disruptions to their services, while LSEG Group reported an outage of its data and news platform Workspace.
Amazon’s AWS cloud service provider said in a statement that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”
