Microsoft-CrowdStrike issue causes ‘largest IT outage in history’ — Live updates

FTC Chair Lina Khan weighed in on the ongoing CrowdStrike outage in a series of posts on X on Friday. Without mentioning CrowdStrike or Microsoft, she appeared to blame the outage on concentrated market power, which creates “fragile systems,” she wrote.

“Concentrating production can concentrate risk, so that a single natural disaster or disruption has cascading effects,” Khan wrote in the series of posts.

Khan did not announce an FTC investigation of the incident, but she linked to unrelated past actions she has taken, including opening up a query on cloud computing companies, and seeking public comment on companies that frequently buy smaller competitors, like in the technology industry.

— Kif Leswing

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized in a blog post for the global outage Friday and reiterated that his company is working closely with impacted customers and partners to restore all systems.

Kurtz encouraged customers to “remain vigilant” in ensuring they engage with official CrowdStrike representatives as they seek support.

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he wrote.

He added that the company’s blog and technical support portal will remain the official channels for updates.

Kurtz reiterated the outage was caused by a defect in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts, and Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted. He emphasized again that the outage was not caused by a security breach or cyberattack.

“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again,” he wrote.

— Katie Bartlett

Railroad Union Pacific is now back to full capacity after facing processing delays and “varying levels of impact” earlier Friday.

“The vast majority of our customers’ freight is moving and full fluidity is returning to our network after this morning’s CrowdStrike software outage,” Union Pacific told CNBC. “In response to the outage our teams swiftly implemented protocols and communication plans, which allowed us to safely keep our trains running.”

— Ece Yildirim

At CommonSpirit Health, which provides care across 150 hospitals in 24 states, employees noticed that many of the health systems’ desktop computers were displaying a blue error screen in the early hours of Friday morning.

The health system has tens of thousands of computers, and they serve as a “window” into all of the organization’s other systems, Daniel Barchi, CIO at CommonSpirit, told CNBC.

“It’s the way our physicians who are doing surgery have access to the images that have been made on a patient’s MRI,” Barchi said. “It’s the way the nurse knows which drugs to give to the patient.”

Barchi said the disruption was deemed a “priority one event,” and that he and other senior IT leaders began working to identify the issue around 2 a.m. They determined the problem was related to an update that CrowdStrike had pushed out, and they were able to contain it before it had finished rolling out to all the computers within CommonSpirit.

But though some computers remained operational, the compromised computers must be fixed manually, one by one.

“We were all stunned by the fact that if a computer gets this blue screen lock up, there’s no way to push a software patch to fix it,” he said. “You literally have to go up to it, login as an administrator, a technology person, and then delete a line of code and make that enabled to come back online.”

Barchi said CommonSpirit has managed to bring many of its computers back online, and many hospitals are returning to business as usual. The health system will continue its remediation process and work to fix its servers through the rest of the day, he said.

— Ashley Capoot

Electric vehicle maker Tesla temporarily halted production on lines at some of its manufacturing facilities on Friday after an unprecedented IT outage impacted global operations due to system issues at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

According to correspondence obtained by CNBC, Tesla’s IT teams notified employees that there was a “windows host outage,” and different systems were affected including “servers, laptops and manufacturing devices.” The IT teams informed Tesla employees that they may see a “blue screen” on their various devices.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also owns social media platform X, posted several complaints about the CrowdStrike outages to his account, which has more than 190 million followers, throughout the morning.

Two Tesla employees who spoke with CNBC, but asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, said that some manufacturing lines were slow to start on Friday morning, and others were temporarily halted in California and Nevada. They also said managers were telling some workers to prepare for canceled shifts or to go home early.

Business Insider, which first reported on the IT memo, wrote that workers in Tesla’s Texas vehicle assembly plant were sent home overnight in response to the outages as well.

As a key Tesla vendor, Microsoft, scrambled to restore its apps and services Friday morning, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a statement on X that an update from CrowdStrike on Thursday impacted global IT systems.

In replies to Nadella on X, Musk wrote that the outages had caused a “seizure” to the automotive supply chain, adding, “We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems, so no rollouts at all.”

Employees confirmed that Tesla was using CrowdStrike as of Friday.

Tesla shares were down more than 3% in afternoon trading on Friday. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for further information.

— Lora Kolodny

The outage has also halted the ability to order Starbucks through its mobile app.

The issue has caused chaos for baristas and other Starbucks employees, leading to temporary store closures and frantic posts online seeking assistance.

At some stores, employees created various handwritten signs for customers, announcing store closures or asking customers to walk up or show an employee a mobile receipt.

Read the full story here.

— Kat Tenbarge, NBC News

Nearly 4% of all scheduled flights around the world have been cancelled due to the disruption, according to new data from the aviation analytics firm Cirium on Friday. The firm said 4,295 flights had been cancelled as of 12 p.m. ET.

In the U.K., 4.6% of all scheduled departures, or 143 flights, have been cancelled, according to Cirium. Around 140 inbound arrivals have also been cancelled.

— Ashley Capoot

Video from flight tracker Flightradar24 shows how passenger flights over the U.S. were affected during the early morning hours after a global IT outage hit airlines and airport services nationwide.

— Gabriel Cortes, Riya Bhattacharjee

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company was working with CrowdStrike to address the global outage.

“We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online,” Nadella said in a post on X.

CrowdStrike and Microsoft have had an adversarial relationship, since CrowdStrike does a brisk business pitching clients on its ability to address vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s systems. CEO George Kurtz roundly criticized Microsoft in an interview with CNBC last year.

— Rohan Goswami

Travelers stuck this morning at JFK Airport in New York met the delays with resignation, weariness and a need to hit the bar.

Colby Black, 45, took the delays in stride, even though he wasn’t sure when his rescheduled flight to Los Angeles would take off. It was originally set to depart at 6 a.m. 

“I’m just tired. I want to sleep,” said Black, who woke up at 3 a.m. “But otherwise, yeah, it happens.”

One mother said she hadn’t slept the night before, just so she and her infant son could get to JFK on time.

“I’m still up, running on no sleep,” she said as she was seated on a barstool beside a heavy pour of chilled white wine. She wasn’t originally planning to order a preflight drink.

“Hell no. I got to the airport at 4 o’clock this morning,” she said.

— Kevin Breuninger

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it isn’t impacted by the outage but is “monitoring for market-related impacts.”

CrowdStrike shares are down around 9% in midday trading, significantly paring back earlier losses. It traded down as much as 20% in pre-market trading. Microsoft shares are flat for the day.

Shares in United Airlines and American Airlines, both of which issued ground stop orders earlier today, have recovered earlier losses as well.

– Rohan Goswami

CrowdStrike‘s major IT outage, which has affected businesses globally, is leading the stock to its worst weekly performance since November 2022.

Shares were 9% lower Friday, pulling the stock down by nearly 16% week to date.

CrowdStrike shares are still higher by 22.5% in 2024.

Drugmaker Amgen, a CrowdStrike customer, said Friday it is assessing the impact of the global outage and working to recover affected systems “as quickly as possible.” 

Amgen did not disclose what kind of systems were impacted.

In a statement on its website, the California-based company urged employees with impacted devices to only follow its guidance. — Annika Kim Constantino

The health-care software vendor Epic Systems, which houses more than 305 million patient medical records, said the outage has caused technical issues that are preventing some health-care organizations from using its systems. 

An Epic spokesperson said the disruption is not affecting the company’s services directly, but it has received reports that the laptop and desktop workstations that some groups use to access Epic are down. Additionally, some groups have reported problems with their data center software, which means they are unable to access patient records through Epic.

“Organizations that have been affected are following pre-established downtime protocols to continue delivering patient care,” an Epic spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “Epic staff are working with customer IT teams to restore access as fixes or mitigation approaches are available from CrowdStrike.”

Epic said its platform for cloud-based applications called Nebula was impacted by the outage. Features like its telehealth offering were temporarily unavailable, but Epic said access has been restored. Epic is continuing to monitor Nebula, the company added. 

— Ashley Capoot

United Airlines’ ground stop has been lifted for all airports, according to an Air Traffic Control System Command Center advisory.

Earlier Friday, the airline had resumed some flights but told CNBC it expected “schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday.”

— Ece Yildirim

England’s National Health Service on Friday said the global outage has impacted its system for booking doctors’ appointments and managing patient records, which is disrupting the majority of general practitioner practices.

That appointment and records system, known as EMIS, is used by nearly 60% of England’s general practitioner practices, which provide medical services to patients of all ages.

NHS, a publicly funded healthcare system, is also experiencing issues with some administrative systems in hospitals, a spokesperson said in a statement. Staff is working manually from paper as a result, but “care is continuing as normal” in the majority of hospitals, they added.

“The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your” general practitioner, the spokesperson said.

Emergency services are currently not affected, according to the spokesperson.

– Annika Kim Constantino

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that he expects the transportation delays to be smoothed out and “resembling normal” by Saturday.

“The issue has been identified. It’s really a matter of the kind of ripple or cascade effects as they get everything in their networks back to normal,” Buttigieg said. “These flights, they run so tightly, so back-to-back that even after a root cause is addressed, you can still be feeling those impacts throughout the day.”

Buttigieg added that there is no indication on any impact to the Department of Transportation’s own systems including air control, but that he is expecting more issues on the airlines’ side.

“We’re tracking all of the various impacts hitting different forms of transportation. The one that I think most people are likely to experience directly is those airline cancellations and delays if you’re planning to fly today,” Buttigieg said.

Nearly 28,000 flights had been delayed globally as of about 11 a.m. ET Friday, with roughly 4,700 of those delays within, into or out of the United States, according to FlightAware data. More than 2,950 flights have been cancelled, with almost 1,800 of them U.S. flights.

— Ece Yildirim

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote in a post on X that Friday’s incident was not related to cybersecurity and that the issue — related to a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts — was identified earlier, with a solution deployed. He added that customers “remain fully protected.”

“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” Kurtz wrote. “We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.”

— Hayden Field

The Federal Reserve said its systems are working amid the global tech outage.

“Critical Federal Reserve Systems are operating normally. We are monitoring the situation and working closely with industry and other government agencies to assess the situation,” the central bank said in a statement to CNBC.

— Leslie Picker