Major US airlines ordered ground stops on Friday citing communications issues, while other carriers, media companies, banks and telecommunications firms around the world also reported system outages were disrupting their operations.

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

In Australia, media, banks and telecoms companies suffered outages, which the government said appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector showed outages at several banks and telecoms companies around the world.

South Africa’s Capitec Bank was experiencing issues that were also related to the global problems. The bank told TechCentral on Friday that it had restored some services and was working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible. It blamed CrowdStrike for the downtime.

CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday on its technical support line. The message said the company was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its “Falcon sensor”.

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cybersecurity incident, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.

Far and wide

The outages rippled far and wide, with Spain reporting a “computer incident” at all its airports, while Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions which it said would affect “all airlines operating across the network”, though it did not specify the nature of the disruptions.

Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, said in a statement that it was “investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS”.