PARIS: Planes were gradually taking off again on Saturday after global airlines, banks and media were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.

Passenger crowds had swelled at airports on Friday as dozens of flights were cancelled after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.

By Saturday, officials said the situation had returned virtually to normal in airports across Germany and France, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games starting on Friday.

Multiple US airlines and airports across Asia said they had resumed operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and mostly back to normal in India, Indonesia and at Singapore’s Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.

“There are no long queues at the airports as we experienced yesterday,” Airports of Thailand president Keerati Kitmanawat told reporters.

Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.

In a Saturday blog post, CrowdStrike said it had released an update on Thursday night that caused a system crash and the infamous “blue screen of death” fatal error message.

CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem and the company’s boss, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologise to every organisation, every group and every person who has been impacted”.

The company also said it could take a few days for a full return to normal.

Australian, British and German authorities warned of an increase in scam and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2024