Ammon News – Services from airlines to health care, shipping and finance came back online Friday after a flaw in a security software update caused hours of global computer systems to go down, a disaster that underscored the fragility of the world’s interconnected technologies.

After the outage was resolved, businesses were left with a backlog of delayed and canceled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other problems that could take days to resolve. Businesses also face questions about how to prevent future blackouts caused by technology meant to protect their systems.

CrowdStrike isn’t a household name, but it’s an $83 billion company with more than 20,000 subscribers worldwide, including Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab . 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 customers.

“We deeply regret the impact we have caused to customers, travelers and everyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz told NBC News.

The outage also raised concerns that many organizations are ill-prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure, such as an IT system or a piece of software within it, goes down. But these outages will happen again, experts say, until more contingency plans are built into networks and organizations introduce better backups.

“This event is a reminder of how complex and interconnected our global computer systems are and how vulnerable they are,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at DA Davidson.

THOUSANDS OF FLIGHTS CANCELLED

Aviation was hit directly, as airlines rely on flexible schedules that, if disrupted, can lead to long delays. Of the more than 110,000 commercial flights scheduled for Friday, 5,000 were canceled worldwide and more are expected, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab was among the hardest hit, with 20% of flights canceled, according to flight tracking service FlightAware. The U.S. carrier said it expected additional delays and cancellations through the weekend.

Airports from Los Angeles to Singapore, Amsterdam and Berlin reported that airlines were checking in passengers with handwritten boarding passes, leading to delays.

Banks and financial services firms warned customers of disruptions, and traders across markets reported difficulties in executing trades. Insurers could face a raft of business interruption claims.

U.S. health care providers reported outages hitting call centers, patient portals and other operations. Mass General Brigham in Boston said it was treating only urgent cases, while Tufts Medical Center warned that patients could experience delays or need to be rescheduled.

In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, medical officials reported on X. Sky News, one of the country’s largest broadcasters, was also taken off air.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the system issues appear to have been resolved and that transportation should hopefully return to normal on Saturday.

Reuters