Passengers wait to check in at Hong Kong International Airport on July 19, 2024, as some airlines switch to manual check-in due to a global outage at Microsoft. (Photo by ISAAC LAWRENCE / AFP)

Planes gradually took off again on Saturday after airlines, banks and media worldwide were thrown into turmoil by one of the worst IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.

Passenger traffic at airports surged on Friday after dozens of flights were canceled after an update to a program running on Microsoft Windows crashed systems around the world.

Officials said on Saturday that the situation at airports in Germany and France was largely back to normal as Paris prepares to welcome millions of people for the Olympic Games that begin on Friday.

Several U.S. airlines and airports in Asia said they had resumed operations. Check-in services were restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand. Flights in India, Indonesia and Singapore’s Changi Airport were largely back to normal as of Saturday afternoon.

– CrowdStrike apologizes –

On Saturday, Microsoft estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the global IT crash. That number represents less than 1 percent of all Windows devices.

“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises running many mission-critical services,” the report said.

According to Microsoft, the issue started at 7:00 p.m. GMT on Thursday and affected Windows users running its CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.

In a blog post on Saturday, CrowdStrike reported that it had released an update on Thursday evening that caused a system crash and the infamous fatal “blue screen of death” error message.

CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the issue and the company’s chief executive, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, group and individual that was affected.”

The company also indicated that it could take a few days for things to return to normal.

Britain’s National Health Service was hit by the crash on Friday, leaving doctors unable to access patient records or book appointments.

A “majority of systems… are now coming back online in most areas. However, they are still running slightly slower than normal,” an NHS spokesman said, warning of disruptions lasting into next week.

Media companies were also affected, with Britain’s Sky News saying the outage had halted news broadcasts on Friday morning. Australia’s ABC also reported major problems.

Australian, British and German authorities warned of a rise in scams and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.

Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported problems with their digital services, some mobile providers experienced outages and a number of companies had customer service down.

“The scale of this power outage is unprecedented and will undoubtedly go down in history,” said Junade Ali of the British Institute of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident of the same scale occurred in 2017.

– Flight chaos –

At some airports, all flights were halted, while at others, staff had to check in passengers manually, leading to long queues and frustrated travellers.

Thousands of U.S. flights were grounded, though airlines later said they were resuming flights and clearing the backlog.

A senior U.S. administration official said Friday that “our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although there is still some congestion.”

India’s largest airline Indigo said on Saturday that operations had been “resolved”, adding in a statement on X that the process of resuming normal operations would “take into the weekend”.

Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online and was “working around the clock to restore departure control systems.”

According to Chinese state media, Beijing’s airports were not affected.

– ‘Common cause’ –

Companies had to repair their systems and assess the damage, while authorities tried to quell panic by ruling out foul play.

According to CrowdStrike’s blog post on Saturday, the issue was “not a result of or related to a cyberattack.”

Although CrowdStrike had released a fix, many experts doubted whether such a process was that easy.

“While experienced users could implement the workaround, it is impractical to expect millions of people to do so,” said Oli Buckley, a professor at Britain’s Loughborough University.

Other experts say the incident should prompt a reexamination of the extent to which societies depend on a handful of technology companies.

“We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of failures across multiple systems at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor at York University in the UK.

The infrastructure must be designed to be “resilient to these kinds of common problems,” he added.