Overnight, a global technology outage grounded flights, and affected multiple agencies and companies around the world — including banks, hospitals and media platforms.
In Arizona, the Phoenix Police Department issued a statement around 2 a.m. on Friday that their 911 center was affected and operators were dispatching police manually. The Phoenix police now says all systems have been restored.
At Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, there are 48 delays and one cancellation as of Friday morning. It's unclear how many are directly because of the global outage.
A spokesperson for the airport says most operations are normal but people should continue to check their flight status — as issues are expected to persist throughout the day.
Some early polling places and Arizona State University were also affected.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the outage is due to a faulty update it sent to computers running Microsoft Windows. It is not a security incident or cyberattack.
Expert says it could take a week to restore all operations
Computer expert Ken Colburn says it could take up to a week for everyone affected to be back to normal.
"Because it requires physical access to the computer in order to fix it," Colburn said.
Colburn called this event the Y-2K people were worried about happening 24 years ago.
"What Windows does when it’s having a really major problem is that it halts everything, it freezes everything, and presents a blue screen with a bunch of information on it. In the industry it’s known as the blue screen of death because you’re done. You can’t do anything else," Colburn said.
