Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) has temporarily halted all flights on Friday due to a technical fault, with delays expected to persist throughout the day although check-in services have resumed.
This disruption comes amidst a tech outage affecting carriers, media companies, banks, and telecom firms globally.
In a related incident, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air grounded flights shortly after Microsoft announced it had resolved a cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.
Hamburg Airport reported that four of the airlines it services were experiencing problems with Crowdstrike, a global cybersecurity firm, though the disruptions were described as manageable.
Zurich Airport stated it was not experiencing any issues, but flights to Berlin were cancelled since BER was not accepting incoming flights until 1000 GMT.
Frankfurt Airport also reported that flights to and from Berlin had been halted until 0945 GMT, but all other operations were running normally.
Lufthansa indicated that it was only slightly affected by the IT disruptions but warned of potential flight cancellations and delays.
Global Impact of the Tech Outage
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to have triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced some broadcasters off air, and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s customers and that a fix was being deployed. Microsoft later confirmed that the issue had been fixed.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz told NBC News’ “Today” programme. “Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz said. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover.”
Experts Weigh In
As companies and institutions began restoring regular services, experts noted that the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre. While the core problem appeared simple, which should make it short-lived, its immediate impact was remarkable. “I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale,” Martin said.
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, which explains why one software issue rippled far and wide.
