It’s being called the biggest I.T. outage in history — a crash of many millions of computers worldwide running the world’s most popular operating system, and its impacts are being felt everywhere. NBC6’s Tony Pipitone reports
A massive Microsoft system outage affected banks, flights and media outlets–including our newsroom–across the world on Friday, and South Florida also felt the effects.
The widespread outage is linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and has highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.
Emergency response, including Miami-Dade County police and fire rescue, was not affected by the outage, they announced Friday morning.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on social media platform X, saying: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
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South Florida airports
At Miami International Airport, the outage affected "all airlines [and] is currently delaying departures and arrivals… Passengers are urged to contact their airline to confirm their flight status before coming to MIA this morning so they can make other travel arrangements if necessary,” Miami-Dade Aviation Department Communications Director Greg Chin said.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport also issued a statement: “An early morning system-wide technology issue is impacting some airline and passenger processing operations at U.S. airports, including #FLL. Flight delays are expected, so travelers should check with their airline for updated flight status before coming to #FLL.”
So far, 272 flights have been delayed and 48 were canceled at MIA, according to flight tracker FlightAware as of 1 p.m. At FLL, 160 flights were delayed and 62 were canceled. It was not immediately clear how many of those delays and cancellations were due to the outage.
At Palm Beach International Airport, a spokesperson said 36 flights have been delayed and 16 have been canceled as of 11:30 a.m., NBC affiliate WPTV reported.
Per its website, the FAA has not issued a ground stop at South Florida airports.
University of Miami
The University of Miami also said it was experiencing disruptions.
“The University of Miami and UHealth – University of Miami Health System are experiencing connectivity issues across various applications, including UChart. The outage did not compromise our data's security and confidentiality,” the university said in a statement.
UM went on to say that “until systems are fully restored, impacted facilities are operating in downtime protocol, using paper orders to disseminate information. All hospitals and clinics will remain open as scheduled. Patients should anticipate delays until systems are fully operational.”
City of Miami
The city of Miami said in a post on X that the outage "has impacted our city online customer services."
Emergency call centers were not affected, the city said.
Banks
NBC6 has reached out to several banks to ask if they were affected by the outage.
Chase Bank responded that it was working to restore systems. TD Bank was also affected, saying: "TD was impacted by today's global technology disruption but we can confirm that the majority of our impacted systems, including online banking, have been restored. Our teams are continuing to monitor all applications to limit further disruptions, and we're working hard to restore the remainder of our impacted systems. We thank our customers for their continued patience during this time."
Truist said its services were open.
Visa said there was "no indication of any impact on Visa's ability to process payments from this issue."
Public transport
Metrobus, Metrorail, Metromover and STS service continued to operate with normal weekday service.
"We are aware of the global technical outage involving CrowdStrike and currently have not been impacted," Miami-Dade Transit said in a post on X.
NBC6
Our overnight crews arrived at the station to find blue screens of death on most newsroom computers.
We still worked to bring you information you need on air and on our 24/7 FAST news channel.
What's going on?
Kurtz said that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing it.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
In a statement to NBC News, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We are aware of the issue affecting a subset of customers. We acknowledge how impactful this is to our customers, and we are working to restore services for those still experiencing disruptions as quickly as possible."
