Two killed in overnight strikes on Ukraine

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Paris: Airlines are slowly coming online on Saturday after global carriers, banks and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by updates to antivirus programs.
Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport posted a video of smooth airport operations shortly after the IT outage was fixed.


Dubai Airports said in a statement that operations have returned to normal after the outage affected the check-in process for some airlines at Terminals 1 and 2.
“The affected airlines immediately switched to an alternative system, allowing normal check-in operations to resume quickly,” the statement said.


Similarly, Kuwait International Airport has informed that flight operations and technical systems of all airlines have been resumed. “The rapid response and activation of the emergency plan approved by the Civil Aviation Authority helped mitigate the negative impact of this outage,” the statement said.
Airports were crowded on Friday as passengers awaited news of an update to a program that runs on Microsoft Windows after systems around the world crashed, with dozens of flights canceled and operators struggling to keep services on track.
Many U.S. airlines and airports across Asia said they were now resuming operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and normal by Saturday afternoon at Changi Airport in India, Indonesia and Singapore.
“Check-in systems are back to normal (at Thailand's five major airports). There are no long lines at the airports that we experienced yesterday,” Airports of Thailand President Kirati Kitamanawat told reporters at Bangkok's Don Mueang Airport.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.
CrowdStrike said it had resolved the issue, and the company's CEO, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC that it would like to “individually apologize to every organization, every group and every person that was affected”.
It also said it will take a few days to return to normal.
US President Joe Biden's team was speaking with people affected by the crowd strike and the blunder “and is standing by to provide assistance if needed,” the White House said in a statement.
“Our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains,” a senior US administration official said.
Reports from the Netherlands and the UK suggested health services may have been affected by the disruption, meaning the full impact may not yet be known.
Media companies were also affected, with Britain's Sky News saying the glitch had ended its Friday morning news broadcast, and Australia's ABC reporting similar major difficulties.
By Saturday, services in Australia were mostly back to normal, but Sydney Airport was still reporting flight delays.
Australian authorities warned of an increase in scams and phishing attempts after the outage, including people asking for help rebooting computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported problems with their digital services, while some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and several companies had reduced customer service.
“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will undoubtedly go down in history,” said Junade Ali of the UK's Institute of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident of the same scale was in 2017.
Manual check-ins
Some airports have suspended all flights, while in others airline staff have resorted to manual check-in for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated passengers.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially ordered all flights to be grounded “regardless of destination”, although airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.
IndiGo, India's largest airline, said in a statement posted on X that the operation had been “resolved”.
“While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are working diligently to resume normal operations, and we expect this process to extend through the weekend,” Carrier said Saturday.
A passenger told AFP that the situation had returned to normal at Delhi airport by midnight on Saturday, with minor delays in international flights.
Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online, and was “working around the clock to recover its departure control system (DCS)” after the global outage. It recommended travelers arrive early at airports and be prepared for “manual check-in” at airline counters.
Chinese state media said Beijing's airport was unaffected.
In Europe, major airports including Berlin, which suspended all flights on Friday, are resuming departures and arrivals.
Companies experience disruptions
While officials tried to ease the panic by denying foul play, companies stopped trying to patch their systems and assess the damage.
CrowdStrike's Kurtz said in a statement that its teams were “fully mobilized” to help affected customers and that “a fix has been deployed.”
But Professor Ollie Buck of Loughborough University in the UK was one of many experts who questioned the ease of rolling out a proper solution.
“While experienced users can implement the solution, it is unreasonable to expect millions to do so,” he said.
Other experts said the incident should prompt a broader rethink about how dependent societies are on a handful of tech companies for such an array of services.
“We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of multiple system failures at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor at the University of York in the UK.
He said infrastructures “must be designed to be resilient against such common cause problems.”

With AFP

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