Emergency Cobra meeting held as NHS and airports hit by global IT outage
An emergency Cobra meeting has been held as Government issues respond to the global IT outage after major disruption has hit to airlines, railways and GP surgeries
An emergency Cobra meeting has been held as the NHS and airports are hit by global IT outage.
Government experts gathered as major institutions across the world report computer issues disrupting services. The meetings have been chaired by senior officials.
Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden said: “Many people are being affected by today’s IT outages impacting services across the country and globally. Ministers are working with their sectors and respective industries on the issue. I am in close contact with teams coordinating our response through the COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room) response system.”
Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike released a statement confirming an IT glitch involving the company’s tech caused huge outages around the world. Crowdstrike - which provides security protection for cloud software including the Microsoft 365 platform - said a corrupted update file on Windows hosts was the cause of the problems.
Some airlines have warned of delays, while some airports have been forced to ground flights. Overnight, IT giant Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an "issue" with its 365 apps and operating systems, and although it said it had recovered some services, it warned that the issue was ongoing and users should expect "service degradation", according to a status page on its website.
Britain’s biggest train company Govia Thameslink Railway is also among those who have affected, warning passengers to expect disruption due to "widespread IT issues". Sky News temporarily came off air due to IT issues. GP surgeries have said they are unable to access patient records or book appointments due to the major global IT outage. NHS England has been contacted for comment after practices across England took to social media to report they cannot access the EMIS Web system. It is understood that NHS hospitals are currently unaffected by the outage.
CrowdStrike president George Kurtz said: "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."
The Liberal Democrats earlier called on the government to hold a Cobra meeting to coordinate an urgent response to the IT outage causing major disruption including to airlines, railways and GP surgeries. Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokeswoman Christine Jardine MP said: “The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised.
"Getting critical infrastructure up and running again must be priority number one. The National Cyber Security Centre should also be working with small businesses and other organisations to help them deal with the outage. This once again lays bare the need to improve our digital infrastructure and truly modernise our economy in order to prevent the incidents from happening again."
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