Transport providers, businesses, hospitals and governments on Saturday are rushing to get all their systems back online after long disruptions following a widespread technology outage.
The biggest continuing effect has been on air travel. Carriers canceled thousands of flights on Friday and now have many of their planes and crews in the wrong place, while airports facing continued problems with check-in and security. On Saturday around 2 p.m. EDT, flight-tracking service FlightAware listed about 25,000 flight delays on its website.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
The Microsoft outage caused by the CrowdStrike software update also caused the return of a familiar — and dreaded — screen for many Windows users: what has come to be known informally as the “blue …