Airlines were gradually coming back online Saturday after global carriers, banks and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.
Passenger crowds had swelled at airports on Friday to wait for news as dozens of flights were cancelled and operators struggled to keep services on track, after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.
Multiple airlines and airports said they were now resuming operations.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.
Fix problem
CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem and the company's boss, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to "personally apologise to every organisation, every group and every person who has been impacted".
It also said it could take a few days to return to normal.
Kenya Airways was among the airlines that experienced a system outage that affected its booking system.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine also reported issues with their digital services, while some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.
'Unprecedented scale'
"The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history," said Junade Ali of Britain's Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017.
While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff resorted to manual check-ins for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travellers.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially ordered all flights grounded "regardless of destination", though airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.
India's largest airline Indigo said operations had been "resolved", in a statement posted on X.
"While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are diligently working to resume normal operations, and we ex pect this process to extend into the weekend," the carrier said Saturday.
Chinese airports unaffected
Chinese state media said Beijing's airports had not been affected.
Companies were left patching up their systems and trying to assess the damage, even as officials tried to tamp down panic by ruling out foul play.
CrowdStrike's Kurtz said in a statement his teams were "fully mobilised" to help affected customers and "a fix has been deployed".
➤ Click here to follow our WhatsApp channel for more stories.
