UK disruption expected to last into next week as global IT outage causes chaos

The aftershocks of Microsoft’s IT outage were still being felt across the UK on Saturday, with holidaymakers and patients bearing the brunt of the computer outage.

Customers faced cancelled flights, broken ticket machines and disruptions to GP prescription and appointment systems after a flawed security update from US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows operating system devices worldwide.

By Saturday afternoon, travel companies and the NHS were giving tentative signals that the problems were being resolved. Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, said that Britain’s airports and train companies “have their IT systems back online and are operating as normal” and that there would be “some delays and a small number of cancelled flights”. NHS England said that “the majority” of computer systems were back online “in most areas”, but warned that further disruption could occur this week.

The impact of Friday’s chaos was still being felt by many. Nearly 7,000 flights were cancelled worldwide, including 408 to and from the UK, on ​​what was the first day of the summer holidays for most English schools and expected to be the busiest travel day since October 2019.

According to aviation analysts Cirium, a further 48 flights were cancelled on Saturday morning and people travelling to Europe flocked to Dover to find an alternative route. Dover Port Authority said there were “hundreds of displaced airport passengers arriving” and warned that anyone travelling would need a ticket in advance.

Rail services were also hit by IT outages on Saturday, with passengers struggling to buy tickets at London’s Waterloo and Paddington stations, while South Western Railway reported that some ticket machines were still out of order.

Pharmacies and GPs were still experiencing the outage on Saturday, with patients finding that appointments on Friday had been cancelled at the last minute. The Royal Surrey NHS Trust declared a critical incident.

Prescriptions could not be mailed to pharmacies, some chemists said, leaving patients unable to receive their medications until the expected time. Clinicians instead used paper records and handwritten prescriptions.

Dr Fari Ahmad, a GP in Cheshire, told BBC Breakfast on Saturday that her practice had been unable to provide patients with test results, which would “cause further problems later in the week”. National Pharmacy Association chairman Nick Kaye said the disruption “will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted over the weekend as pharmacies recover.”

David Weston, vice president of enterprise and operating system security at Microsoft, said in a blog post yesterday that the company “recognizes the disruption this issue has caused to businesses and to the daily routines of many individuals.”

He said: “We currently estimate that the CrowdStrike update impacted 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises running many critical services.”

Emmalinda MacLean and Eric Rosloff had expected to be home in Los Angeles on Saturday morning after two weeks in Scotland, but instead ended up at Heathrow.

Their connecting flight from Glasgow was delayed on Friday, leaving them with little flexibility upon arrival at Heathrow.

“We ran through the airport to catch our connection, but security stopped us and sent us to customer service,” MacLean said. “We waited in line for three hours,” her husband added. “And the whole time, our flight was still on the tarmac. But they wouldn’t let us on.”

Dozens of other passengers had similar problems, they said, and after spending the night in an airport hotel, they returned Saturday to try to get home.