ABC News – IT outages have been reported across the globe as airlines, airports, banks and media companies have suddenly experienced ongoing disruptions that have upended the daily lives of potentially millions of people.
American Airlines, United and Delta have asked the FAA for global ground stop on all flights, according to an alert from the FAA on Friday morning.
However, at approximately 5 am ET, American Airlines issued a statement that they were back up and running as normal.
“Earlier this morning, a technical issue with a vendor impacted multiple carriers, including American. As of 5 am ET, we have been able to safely re-establish our operation. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the statement read.
The FAA is telling air traffic controllers to tell airborne pilots that airlines are currently experiencing communication issues.
“No one here knows anything, the gate agents said we all know as much as they do,” Scott Sanders told ABC News, saying his flight from SeaTac Airport in Washington was delayed for two hours on the tarmac before passengers were deplaned. “I feel awful for the employees and those that have a sick loved one they need to get to or funerals, thankfully that’s not us.”
Meanwhile, flights in the air will stay in the air, but no American, United or Delta flights have been taking off.
“We’re aware of a technical issue with CrowdStrike that is impacting multiple carriers. American is working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement obtained by ABC News.
“A third party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United,” United Airlines said in a statement on Friday morning. “While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
It is unclear how widespread the issue is but Melbourne Airport in Australia has also said they are “experiencing a global technology issue” which is impacting their check-in procedures.
Global IT outages have also been reported in many countries across the world including Berlin Airport in Germany, the London Stock Exchange, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Gatwick Airport in the United Kingdom.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said in a statement released on social media Friday morning.
Crowdstrike, the U.S. cybersecurity company, has admitted to being responsible for the error and are working to correct it.
“Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows 4 related to the Falcon sensor. Please monitor the status via the tech alert on our customer support portal,” says a message on the Crowdstrike technical help line on Friday morning.
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By Sam Sweeney and Jon Haworth. ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Zunaira Zaki and Helena Skinner contributed to this report.
