A technology issue that started late Thursday sparked a widespread outage impacting airports, businesses and broadcasters across the globe.
The head of CrowdStrike, the company responsible for an update that took millions of people offline, said Friday the massive global outage was not a cyberattack nor a security incident.
CrowdStrike acknowledged late Thursday it was investigating the issue. For those still trying to recover from the massive outage, CrowdStrike engineers released an urgent fix to their software glitch behind the crash.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on X "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. This is not a security incident or a cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolate and a fix has been deployed."
In the Bay Area, San Francisco International Airport confirmed it was experiencing an airport-wide tech issue. Ground stops were issued worldwide, causing cancellations and delays. SFO systems were slowly recovering Friday morning.
The incident also impacted NBC Bay Area and other local media companies from broadcasting live newscasts.
The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta. Some banks were also reportedly impacted by the outage.
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The massive outage carried into Friday. Many users reported encountering the so-called "blue screen of death" on their computers when the outage occurred.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said its cloud services have been mostly restored after suffering an outage.
According to CNBC, the U.S. tech giant said late Thursday customers in the Central U.S. region may experience issues with multiple Azure services and its Microsoft 365 suite of apps. This could include "failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services."
"We are aware of the issue affecting a subset of customers," a Microsoft spokesperson said to NBC News. "We acknowledge how impactful this is to our customers, and we are working to restore services for those still experiencing disruptions as quickly as possible."
It is not clear whether the Microsoft outage was linked to the CrowdStrike incident.
Harlotte Graham-McLay with the Associated Press contributed to this report.
