Airlines resume operations after unprecedented information blackout

The situation is gradually returning to normal after an unprecedented messaging outage between international airlines, banks and financial institutions on Saturday caused by a faulty anti-virus program update.
Dozens of flights were cancelled and airports around the world were packed with passengers on Friday while operators struggled to continue operations after a flawed update to a cybersecurity program from U.S. group Crowdstrike caused global glitches when it was downloaded on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Several U.S. airlines and airports across Asia have reportedly begun resuming operations, with passenger check-ins having resumed in Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia and Singapore’s Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.
“The passenger check-in system at Thailand’s five main airports has returned to normal,” Airports of Thailand president Kirati Kitamanuat told reporters at Bangkok’s Don Muang airport. “No more queues like we saw on Friday.”
Microsoft said the issue started on Thursday and affected users of its CrowdStrike Falcon plan.
CrowdStrike said it had deployed software to address the issue, and its president, George Curtis, told US news channel CNBC that he wanted to “personally apologise to every institution, every group and every person who was harmed”.
She added that it would take a few days for the situation to return to normal.
The White House announced in a statement that U.S. President Joe Biden’s team is in communication with CrowdStrike and those affected by the flaw and is “prepared to provide assistance as needed.”
“Our information indicates that flight operations have resumed across the country, albeit with some congestion,” a senior U.S. government official said.
Health services affected
Reports from the Netherlands and the UK suggest health services may have been affected by the unrest, meaning the full extent of the damage may not yet be known.
Media organisations were also affected, with Britain’s Sky News channel saying the flaw had caused its news broadcasts to be halted on Friday, while Australian broadcaster ABC reported major difficulties.
Australian authorities have warned of a rise in post-holiday scams and phishing attempts, 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, and customer service at some mobile phone companies and some institutions was also disrupted.
“The scale of this failure is unprecedented and will undoubtedly go down in history,” said Junaid Ali, a cybersecurity expert at the UK’s Institution of Engineering and Technology. He added that the last incident of this scale was in 2017.
Airport chaos
From Amsterdam to Zurich, Singapore to Hong Kong, airport operators reported technical problems that disrupted their services. While some airports suspended all flights, airline staff at others were forced to check in passengers manually.
The Federal Aviation Administration initially ordered all flights suspended “regardless of destination,” although airlines later announced they were restarting service.
IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced in a post on the “X” platform that it had “resolved” the issue. “While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are working to restore normal operations and expect these measures to continue through the weekend,” the company said.
The situation at Delhi airport had returned to normal by Saturday midnight, with only minor delays for international flights, a passenger told AFP.
Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still working to restore internet connectivity and was “working around the clock to restore control systems for departing flights following a global outage”. It asked passengers to arrive at the airport early and be ready to “manually check in” at the airline’s office. Chinese state media reported that Beijing’s airport was not affected by the outage. In Europe, major airports including Berlin suspended all flights early Friday, with departures and arrivals reported to have resumed.
Common causes
Companies rushed to repair systems and survey the damage, and officials sought to reduce panic by ruling out any cyberattack.
CrowdStrike’s Curtis said in a statement that his team was “fully mobilized” to help affected customers and that “software has been deployed” to fix the bug.But Ollie Buckley, a professor at Britain’s Loughborough University, is one of many experts who have expressed doubts about how easy it would be to deploy the right software to fix the problem.
He added: “While experienced users can implement the solution, it is unrealistic to expect millions of people to do so.”
Other experts said the incident should prompt a broad reconsideration of how much organizations rely on a handful of technology companies to provide such a wide range of services.
“We have to recognise that this type of software can be a common cause of failure in multiple systems at once,” said John McDiarmid, a professor at the University of York in the UK. He added that infrastructure should be designed to withstand such problems due to common causes.
(AFP)