A worldwide computer systems outage related to Microsoft Windows wreaked havoc on a wide swath of American life on Friday, keeping airplanes on the ground, disrupting health care, courts, banks and theaters — even preventing some Starbucks customers from ordering their mochas and cold brews.
The global glitch underscored the vulnerability of such far reaching dependence on software provided by only a handful of organizations.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former Head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre.
That discomfort hit home immediately at Chicago’s airports.
Passengers arriving at O’Hare International Airport on Friday morning were greeted with “the blue screen of death” — an unfortunate reminder that they weren’t going anywhere fast.
Kay and Larry Light were pulling up to O’Hare around 5:30 a.m. when a friend from Ireland alerted them about the outages.
It didn’t take long for them to experience it firsthand, seeing an airport “packed” when they arrived and their phones “exploding” with notifications.
The two were on their way to see their newly engaged daughter in Massachusetts — in addition to a weekend trip going around the Boston coast — and had already booked several hotels and a rental car.
By 8 a.m. they were scrambling to grab seats on standby flights, though they worried about checking their bags and missing the flight as much as they did about rescheduling hotel stays.
“It’s sort of a dilemma, do you go home for the guarantee or wait around for standby,” Larry said.
By Friday afternoon, the Chicago Department of Aviation reported 230 flights have been canceled in the past 24 hours at O’Hare.
Another nine have been canceled at Midway, according to the city’s real-time delay dashboard.
Friday’s chaos began with a faulty update that was pushed out from CrowdStrike, an online security firm whose software is used around the world across multiple industries. In a Friday post on social media platform X, George Kurtz, president and CEO, cited a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” — noting that Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted.
But, because scores of companies rely on CrowdStrike for their security needs with Windows as their operating system, the consequences of this kind of technical problem are far-reaching.
DownDectector, which tracks user-reported disruptions to internet services, recorded that airlines, payment platforms and online shopping websites across the world were affected — although the disruption appeared piecemeal and was apparently related to whether the companies used Microsoft cloud-based services.
At Midway Airport, Volaris airline employees were seen writing information down instead of using computers.
One passenger said Volaris is just writing passengers’ information down and that they were told they’d call them when flights are good to go. By early afternoon, several Volaris customers were told by gate attendants that if they hadn’t printed out boarding passes or downloaded one to their phone prior to the system going down, that they would not be able to fly and would need to be put on a later flight.
Metra reported delays up to 45 minutes Friday morning on its Union Pacific lines because of the global tech outage.
Metra spokesman Michael Gillis said the tech outage affected the Union Pacific lines, which are run and dispatched by the UP. The UP-NW lines was affected the most, with three canceled trains and several delayed trains, he said. There were also delays up to 25 minutes on the UP-West line, and minor delays on the North Central Service, where trains were held up by crossings with a UP line.
Inside Ogilvie Station, billboards were showing a blue Microsoft error screen. Clear Channel Outdoor, which runs the billboards, didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Servers at UChicago Medicine were also affected.
According to a message sent to staff, the outage caused overnight disconnections to hundreds of UChicago Medicine’s computer systems and servers, mostly those using Windows.
By 10 a.m., the “vast majority of systems” at the health care network had been restored.
The outage disrupted state government operations, including several online systems that serve the public.
Initial court hearings at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse were delayed, and some defendants who were supposed to be transferred from the Illinois Department of Corrections weren’t expected to show up at all, Cook County Judge Deidre Dyer said.
Even people looking for a cup of coffee or theater tickets experienced the outage’s effects.
A notice on the Goodman Theatre’s website told customers that their ticketing system would not be able to process orders electronically but the box office (opening at noon Friday) would take requests by phone and contact customers once service returned.
Steppenwolf Theatre posted a similar message on its website, telling customers “We are working with our technology partners to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Starbucks was also hit by the outage, affecting mobile ordering and payment, said Jaci Anderson, director of corporate communications at the coffee chain.
Experts stress that Friday’s disruptions underscore the vulnerability of worldwide dependence on software that comes from only a handful of providers.
And those caught up in the massive mess agreed.
“The question is, why are we not fault tolerant against a single issue?” stalled O’Hare passenger Larry Light wondered. “You see the ripple effects, you have to question how it was evaluated and tested.”
Contributing: Pat Nabong, Zubaer Khan, Miriam DiNunzio, Subrina Hudson, AP