London: The UK’s airports and trains experienced delays, with the London Stock Exchange and the National Health Service among the other organisations in the country dealing with the fallout of a global IT outage on Friday that has grounded planes and caused chaos around the world.
The outage, related to an issue at US-headquartered prolific cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and Microsoft, affected Windows PCs globally and also forced ‘Sky News’ off the air.
Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity service designed to stop internet breaches or hacks for the world’s biggest companies, has since apologised for the problems caused by a software bug even as it ruled out the possibility of this being a cyberattack. Microsoft has also identified an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software as the factor behind the global tech issues.
“We’re deeply sorry. The update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, told news channels.
“We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue,” he said.
He had earlier taken to X to state that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack”.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” he said.
UK Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden said ministerial teams were coordinating their response to the major outage through COBRA, the government’s emergency response committee.
“Ministers are working with their sectors and respective industries on the issue,” he said.
London’s biggest airport, Heathrow, said in a statement that its “flights are operational though we are experiencing delays”. While the airport said it is implementing contingency plans to minimise impact, Gatwick Airport said passengers “may experience some delays” when checking in and passing through security. Luton and Edinburgh Airport, meanwhile, switched to manual systems to support operations.
The London Stock Exchange Group said trading continues to operate as normal while it is working on resolving an issue with its RNS Service, which provides the Regulatory News Service announcements.
The IT outage, which is not believed to be linked with a malicious attack or hack, also hit several National Health Service (NHS) general practitioner (GP) surgeries around the UK as they were unable to access patient records or book online appointments.
NHS England said the IT outage is “causing disruption in the majority of GP practices” in England but there is currently no known impact on its 999 or emergency services.
Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a “critical incident” citing external IT issues, affecting its delivery of radiotherapy treatment.
“We are unable to access driver diagrams at certain locations, leading to potential short-notice cancellations, particularly on the Thameslink and Great Northern networks,” said Govia Thameslink Railway, one of the train companies impacted.
“Additionally, other key systems, including our real-time customer information platforms, are also affected,” it added.
National Rail, in charge of the country’s railway network, said its IT teams are “actively investigating to determine the root cause of the problem”.
All major UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons and Waitrose also reported issues with online services.
The first reports of the outage emanated from the United States late on Thursday after a breakdown of Microsoft services such as Azure and 365.
In a post on X, Microsoft 365 Status stated that “multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress”.
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