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Airlines Resume Services after Global IT Crash

DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JULY 20: Travelers wait in a long line to speak with a Delta representative at the help desk in the McNamara terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on July 20, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP
DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JULY 20: Travelers wait in a long line to speak with a Delta representative at the help desk in the McNamara terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on July 20, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP
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Airlines Resume Services after Global IT Crash

DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JULY 20: Travelers wait in a long line to speak with a Delta representative at the help desk in the McNamara terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on July 20, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP
DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JULY 20: Travelers wait in a long line to speak with a Delta representative at the help desk in the McNamara terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on July 20, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

Airlines were gradually coming back online Saturday after global carriers, banks and financial institutions 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 to wait for news as dozens of flights were cancelled and operators struggled to keep services on track, after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.

Multiple US airlines and airports across Asia said they were now resuming 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.

"The check-in systems have come back to normal (at Thailand's five major airports). There are no long queues at the airports as we experienced yesterday," Airports of Thailand president Keerati Kitmanawat told reporters at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok.

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

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 apologize to every organization, every group and every person who has been impacted".

It also said it could take a few days to return to normal.

Reports from the Netherlands and Britain suggested health services might have been affected by the disruption, meaning the full impact might not yet be known.

Media companies were also hit, with Britain's Sky News saying the glitch had ended its Friday morning news broadcasts, and Australia's ABC similarly reporting major difficulties.

By Saturday, services in Australia had mostly returned to normal, but Sydney Airport was still reporting flight delays.

While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff resorted to manual check-ins for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travelers.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially ordered all flights grounded "regardless of destination", though airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.

India's largest airline Indigo said operations had been "resolved", in a statement posted on X.

"While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are diligently working to resume normal operations, and we expect this process to extend into the weekend," the carrier said Saturday.

A passenger told AFP that the situation was returning to normal at Delhi Airport by midnight on Saturday with only slight delays in international flights.

Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online, and had been "working around the clock towards recovering its departure control systems (DCS)" after the global outage. It recommended passengers arrive early at airports and be ready for "manual check-in" at airline counters.

Chinese state media said Beijing's airports had not been affected.

In Europe, major airports including Berlin, which had suspended all flights earlier on Friday, said departures and arrivals were resuming.

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UN Approves More Transparent Procedures for People, Entities to Get Off Sanctions Lists

Members of the United Nations Security Council attend a meeting at UN headquarters in New York, US, October 5, 2022. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo
Members of the United Nations Security Council attend a meeting at UN headquarters in New York, US, October 5, 2022. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo
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UN Approves More Transparent Procedures for People, Entities to Get Off Sanctions Lists

Members of the United Nations Security Council attend a meeting at UN headquarters in New York, US, October 5, 2022. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo
Members of the United Nations Security Council attend a meeting at UN headquarters in New York, US, October 5, 2022. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo

The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved more transparent procedures Friday for the hundreds of individuals, companies and other entities who are subject to UN sanctions and want to get off the blacklists.
The resolution, co-sponsored by Malta and the United States, also authorizes the establishment of a new informal working group by the Security Council to examine ways to improve the effectiveness of UN sanctions.
Malta’s UN Ambassador Vanessa Frazier told the council before the vote that the resolution is a “clear signal of this council’s commitment towards due process.”
It authorizes a new “focal point” to directly engage with those seeking to get off sanctions lists and gather information from a variety of sources to share with the Security Council committee monitoring sanctions, which makes the decisions on delisting, she said. And it requires the reason for the committee’s decision to be given to the petitioner.
After the vote, US deputy ambassador Robert Wood called the council’s unanimous approval “a historic moment,” saying delisting procedures haven't changed for 18 years.
“The international community is demonstrating its commitment to values such as transparency and fairness in UN sanctions processes,” he said.
“Security Council sanctions are an important tool to deter an array of threats to peace and security, ranging from the proliferation of arms and weapons of mass destruction, to countering terrorism and preventing human rights abuses,” The Associated Press quoted Wood as saying.
But he stressed that to be effective, sanctions must be targeted and there must be “robust and fair procedures for delisting when warranted.”
The United States is against indefinite and punitive sanctions, and supports delisting and easing sanctions when warranted, Wood said. “But we are concerned by a growing tendency to prematurely lift sanctions, when the threats that prompted their imposition in the first place still persist.”
He didn’t give any examples but the US and its allies including South Korea and Japan have vehemently opposed Russian and Chinese proposals to ease sanctions on North Korea, which violates UN sanctions regularly with its ballistic missile tests and nuclear developments.
Russia’s deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyansky said Moscow proceeds from the premise that Security Council sanctions “are one of the most stringent and robust responses to threats to peace. Therefore, they should be applied in an exceedingly cautious way.”
“They need to be irreproachable, be substantiated, and they need to be nuanced,” he said. “The use of such sanctions as a punitive tool is unacceptable.”
Polyansky stressed that sanctions need to reflect the real situation in a country and “help facilitate a political process.”
But he said the Security Council doesn’t always follow this approach, and blamed the West for increasingly encouraging the use of sanctions in recent years.