Microsoft IT outage live: Total recovery ‘could take weeks’ amid more flight delays

Indie rock band Bombay Bicycle Club have announced the rescheduled date of a music festival performance they missed due to the global IT outage.

The British group, comprised of Jack Steadman, Jamie MacColl, Suren de Saram and Ed Nash, were due to play Poolbar Festival in the Austrian town of Feldkirch on Friday but missed it due to a cancelled flight.

In a post to Instagram on Friday evening they said: “Unfortunately our flights to get to tonight’s Poolbar Festival show were cancelled because of the IT outage.

Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said the IT systems of UK airports and train operators are “back up and working as normal”, but “some delays and a small number of cancelled flights” were expected.

In a post on social media, Ms Haigh wrote: “Pleased to report that UK airports and train operators have their IT systems back up and working as normal.

“We are in constant communication with industry.

“There continues to be no known safety or security issues arising from the outage.

“Some delays and a small number of cancelled flights are expected today.

“Train operators are no longer reporting cancellations and delays as a result of the IT failure.

“Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to get systems up and running again.”

Holidaymakers have been warned of potential travel disruption this weekend as UK transport networks continue to feel the impact of Friday’s global IT outage.

Flight delays and cancellations are among the disruption expected to continue into the weekend after the outage, with experts warning it could take weeks for systems to fully recover.

It comes as thousands of families start to embark on summer holidays amid the end of the academic year for many schools.

He told the PA news agency: “The queue was so long we would have missed the flight, which was clearly overbooked.

“So I pushed in and insisted to be dealt with. The flight was absolutely full, so if I’d not pushed in, we wouldn’t have even got seats.

“We arrived at the Gate with 20 mins to spare. Security was excellent and swift, but my criticism of Heathrow was the lack of information and staff very poorly briefed.

“There was no prioritisation of urgent flight needs nor even notice boards telling passengers where to go or what to do.”

A statement from the firm said following the incident on 19 July, “CrowdStrike Intelligence has since observed threat actors leveraging the event to distribute a malicious ZIP archive…Spanish filenames and instructions within the ZIP archive indicate this campaign is likely targeting Latin America-based (LATAM) CrowdStrike customers.”

Although the incident causing the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, officials have warned there could be an increased risk of malicious attacks.

On Saturday the UK National Cyber Security Centre warned affected organisations over “an increase in related phishing” as “opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation”.

On Friday, July 19, it was reported that cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued a faulty software update on Microsoft’s Windows operating system, crashing and infecting computers with the “blue screen of death” that left users unable to restart.

Because companies have computer systems run via Microsoft, this has resulted in flights being canceled, television stations being taken offline, and some banks being unable to make payments.

GPs, pharmacies and NHS 111 services across the country suffered major disruption on Friday after an update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company crashed Microsoft Windows systems.

Health correspondent Rebecca Thomas reports: