Global Tech Outage Grounds Flights and Hits Businesses

A massive global technology outage on Friday took down airlines, medical services, TV broadcasts, banks and scores of other business and services around the world, a stunning example of the fragile dependence the global economy has on certain software and the cascading effect it can have when things go wrong.

The outage was attributed to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by scores of industries around the world to protect against hackers and outside breaches. A software update issued by CrowdStrike appeared to be at the root of the problem, resulting in crashes of machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” said George Kurtz, the chief executive of CrowdStrike. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”