The morning of July 19, 2024, witnessed a severe outage in CrowdStrike ervices, leading to the interruption of services worldwide for banks, airlines, media outlets, supermarkets, and other critical sectors of society and the economy. In the transportation sector, severe problems immediately arose in air travel, with several major airlines, including the American carriers United, Delta, and American Airlines, suspending all flights. Delays and cancellations are also being reported in Europe, Australia, and Japan.
Several major airports have been affected, including those in Berlin, which is paralyzed due to an IT network failure, Madrid and Sydney, where departing flights have been halted, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam Schiphol. In the United Kingdom, interruptions in rail transport have also been reported. However, this is only a preliminary assessment.
The causes of this IT blackout are not yet clear. Initial hypotheses suggest an issue with an update to a cybersecurity software (Crowdstrike) used by many companies, which may have caused abnormal blocks in Windows computers.
