A global tech outage disrupted operations in multiple industries in Cyprus and abroad on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.

The Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (Cyta) announced on Friday morning that they were unable to operate their call centres, and that other digital channels and stores had also been impacted.

They said the issue is “being handled in cooperation with the supplier company”.

With airports around the world impacted by the outage, the Cyprus Mail made persistent and repeated attempts to contact Cyprus’ airports’ operator Hermes airports throughout Friday morning but was unable to do so.

On Friday afternoon, Hermes airports told the Cyprus News Agency (CNA) that the Republic of Cyprus’ two airports, in Paphos and Larnaca, were “not affected by the technical problems presented by several international airlines”.

They did note that a number of flights, both inbound and outbound, would be delayed, but that this was “not due to problems at Cyprus’ airports, but due to changes in airlines’ flight schedules in other countries affected by the problems.”

However, airline Wizz Air had confirmed earlier in the day that its operations in Cyprus were facing “extreme technical challenges”.

They added that their website and mobile application, their booking system, their online check-in system, their digital boarding passes, and their contact centres were all out of action.

Reported disruptions after the global tech outage?

AIRLINES, AIRPORTS

Airports and airlines around the globe have warned of delays and cancellations or switched to manual check-in, with some halting flights.

  • Berlin airport temporarily halted all flights, a spokesperson told Reuters. Lufthansa’s LHAG.DE Eurowings said it was halting domestic German flights as well as flights to and from Britain until 3 p.m. (1300 GMT).
  • Spanish airport operator Aena AENA.MCreported a computer systems incident while Lisbon airport, Portugal’s biggest, also experienced disruption. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and reportedly Brussels airport were affected as well.
  • Top Dutch airline KLM AIRF.PAsaid it could not handle flights on Friday and that it suspended most of its operations. Air France, KLM’s parent company, said that its operations were disrupted.
  • Turkish Airlines is experiencing problems with ticketing, check-in, and booking, it said in a post on X. Budapest Airport said several airline check-in systems were out of operation.
  • Major U.S. carriers including American Airlines AAL.O, Delta Airlines DAL.N and United Airlines UAL.Ohalted flights on Friday morning citing communication issues. American Airlines later said it had re-established operations. Frontier and Spirit too cancelled directives to ground planes.
  • A SAS spokesperson said the Scandinavian airline was expecting delays. Australia’s national airline Qantas QAN.AX and Sydney airport said planes were delayed but still flying.
  • Swiss air traffic control company Skyguide said it had temporarily reduced Swiss air traffic capacity by 30%.
  • Indian airlines, including SpiceJet SPJT.BO, Indigo, Akasa Air, Vistara, Air India and Air India Express were also facing issues on Friday.

FINANCIALS

  • Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank CBA.AX, said earlier issues affecting PayID instant transfers had been resolved. Services including Netbank, the CommBank app, CommBiz, merchant payments and ATMs are available.
  • Several major oil and gas trading desks in London and Singapore were struggling to execute trades, six industry sources told Reuters.
  • Macquarie Capital was unable to provide liquidity for unexpired warrants on HKEX.
  • South Africa’s Capitec said card payments, ATM and app services were fully restored following significant nationwide disruptions.
  • LSEG Group’s LSEG.L Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage that affected user access worldwide, causing disruption across financial markets. It said in a client memo that technical problems on FX spot and forward rates have been resolved and services restored.
  • Some brokerages in India are facing technical difficulties, traders at the brokerages told Reuters.
  • German insurer Allianz ALVG.DEsaid it was experiencing a major outage that is impacting employees’ ability to log on to their computers.
  • Some German banks are facing disruptions, a spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association, said on Friday, without providing further details.
  • Barclays BARC.Lsaid its digital investing platform Smart Investor was impacted.
  • Brazilian lender Bradesco said its digital platforms were unavailable on Friday.

MEDIA

  • Britain’s Sky News resumed broadcasting after an hours-long outage, but operating at minimal capacity and without many of its usual services.
  • Australia’s state broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”, without giving a reason.
  • Regular programming at Sky News Australia was disrupted.

EMERGENCY SERVICES, HEALTHCARE

  • England’s National Health Service (NHS) said bookings of doctors’ appointments and patient records were disrupted, but emergency services had not been affected.
  • Several hospitals in the Netherlands had to scale down their operations, Dutch press agency ANP reported.
  • Victorian state police in Australia said some internal systems had been hit but emergency services were operating normally.
  • Copenhagen’s fire department said on X it was experiencing problems receiving automatically transmitted fire alarms, and urged people to call 112 in case of a fire.
  • Two hospitals in the northern German cities of Luebeck and Kiel have cancelled elective operations scheduled for Friday.

OTHER

  • Critical infrastructure in Germany has been affected, an interior ministry spokesperson said.
  • New Zealand’s parliamentary computer systems were affected, according to Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, head of the parliamentary service.
  • Australia’s Telstra GroupTLS.AX was facing disruptions to some of its systems, a spokesperson for the telecom firm told Reuters.
  • The Baltic Hub container terminal in the Polish city of Gdansk said it was hit by the global outage in Microsoft systems and was working to solve the issue.
  • The Paris Olympics organising committee said the cyber outage was slowing its operations, but the impact was limited and ticket sales were unaffected.
  • The United Arab Emirates foreign ministry said its electronic systems were functioning normally again.
  • Maruti Suzuki MRTI.NS, India’s largest carmaker, said it briefly halted production and despatch operations. It has resumed operations and does not expect any material impact from the incident.

As a result, they said, passengers may check in at the airport in person for free.

They also recommended that passengers arrive at Larnaca airport at least three hours before their scheduled time of departure.

Greek airline Aegean, another of Larnaca’s major carriers, said its own operations remained “relatively unaffected” by the outage, but that “due to the problems affecting our global chain and support systems, certain services on our website have been affected.”

Like Wizz Air, they also encouraged passengers to “please arrive at the airport well in advance as access points may be affected by longer lines than usual”.

The Cyprus Mail was also one of the affected companies, with problems related to internet connectivity and other server issues impacting the company on Friday. The Mail apologises for any inconvenience caused by the outage and is pleased to report that full operational capacity was restored on Friday afternoon.

Cypriot Deputy Research Minister Nikodemos Damianou was keen to play the issue down, telling CNA the outage “does not seem to be seriously affecting Cyprus”, but that his deputy ministry is “monitoring the issue”.

“As a state, we have not been affected. We have examined the issue in critical infrastructure such as banks and airports, and they do not seem to have been affected,” he said.

He added, “we are in consultation and are monitoring the developments, and this does not seem to be a serious issue for Cyprus.”

The outage was part of a global tech failure which disrupted operations across multiple industries on Friday, halting flights and upending everything from banking to healthcare systems.

CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity company with a market value of about €76 billion, is among the most popular in the world, counting more than 20,000 subscribers around the world, the company’s website shows.

According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients at 8.30am Cyprus time on Friday and reviewed by Reuters, its widely used “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, said in a post on X, the social media platform better known as Twitter, that CrowdStrike had deployed a fix for the issue. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he wrote.

However, it is not clear how easily the affected systems can be fixed remotely, as the “Blue Screen of Death” is causing computers to crash on reboot before they can be updated.

“This means in this state, devices can’t be updated automatically, meaning manual intervention is required,” said Daniel Card, of United Kingdom-based cybersecurity consultancy PwnDefend.

Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency, said the scale of the problem was huge.

“This is not unprecedented, but I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale. It has happened over the years, but this is one of the biggest. I think it’ll likely be short-lived because, the nature of the problem is actually quite simple“.

“But it’s very, very, very, very, big” he added.

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and businesses alike have become increasingly dependent on a handful of interconnected technology companies over the past two decades.

Experts say the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.

To protect their computer networks from being breached by hackers, many businesses use a cybersecurity product known as Endpoint Detection and Response, or EDR, which runs in the background of corporate machines, or “endpoints”.

Firms like CrowdStrike are able to use their EDR products as early warning systems for potential digital attacks, scan for viruses, and prevent hackers from gaining unauthorised access to corporate networks.

However, in this case, something in CrowdStrike’s code is conflicting with something in the code that makes Windows work, and causing those systems to crash, even after rebooting.

“With the move to the cloud and with companies like CrowdStrike owning huge market shares, their software is running on millions of computers around the world,” Card said.

The global tech outage has affected operations in different sectors internationally including at Spanish airports, US airlines, and Australian media and banks.

The governments of Australia, New Zealand, and a number of US states are facing issues, while American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air grounded flights citing communication problems.

In the UK, Sky News, one of the country’s major television news channels, was off air for hours on Friday before service was restored.