A global network outage disrupted essential services around New York such as planes and trains early Friday morning, according to reports from multiple agencies.
The problems seem to have stemmed from an update to a Microsoft program called CrowdStrike that crashed every computer system that received it, according to Matthew Fraser, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer.
Fraser, in an interview Friday morning with WNYC, said the update did not affect the city’s 911, 311 or traffic light systems, which run on separate operational networks to shield them form these kinds of outages.
“The good news is, everything that’s critical, the critical services across the city everything from 911, 311, traffic management, water management — everything else in between that’s most critical – those systems are not impacted,” Fraser said. “We’re taking a catalog right now of everything that received that update, and we’re trying to put together a list of things that are impacted.”
But any computer systems that do use the software experienced “the blue screen of death,” Fraser said. “That basically means that the system went under a critical failure and it didn’t know how to recover.”
Online services like banking and managing flight bookings were down, and airlines like American and Delta asked the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a global ground stop on all flights.
JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Airports all cautioned travelers not to head to the airport unless their flight status was confirmed, though the Port Authority itself said it was not affected.
The MTA said train service was unaffected though customer information systems were temporarily offline.
By 6 a.m., CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz announced on X that the cybersecurity firm had deployed a fix, but it was unclear how quickly all the services would recover.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he wrote.
Elizabeth Kim and Alec Hamilton contributed reporting.
This is a developing story and will be updated.