KUWAIT/PARIS: Planes were gradually taking off again Saturday and services from healthcare to shipping and finance were coming back online after global airlines, banks and media 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 as dozens of flights were canceled after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.

By Saturday, officials said the situation had returned virtually to normal in airports across Germany and France, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games starting on Friday. Multiple US airlines and airports across Asia said they had resumed 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.

Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software. In a Saturday blog post, CrowdStrike said it had released an update on Thursday night that caused a system crash and the infamous “blue screen of death” fatal error message. 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”.

Kuwait Airways’ systems are working normally round the clock and its communications with passengers, foreign stations and security sectors are going on uninterrupted, said its CEO Ahmad Al-Kreebani Friday. The Kuwaiti national airline’s cybersecurity and information technology teams have immediately taken the required procedures of isolating the affected systems to ensure the safety of passengers and aircraft, he said in a press statement. Kuwait-based Jazeera Airways however that its operating systems were affected by the technical glitch. The low-cost airline indicated its IT operations were heavily impacted.

Production and export operations of Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) are going on normally, the company’s spokesman Eisa Al-Maraghi said Friday. Maraghi, who doubles as KOC’s Deputy CEO for Planning and Innovation, said the company does not use the CrowdStrike system and that its systems are working normally. He pointed out KOC’s technical teams are on high alert to deal with any emergency as per relevant procedures.

Acting CEO of Kuwait Oil Tanker Company (KOTC) Sheikh Khaled Al-Sabah assured the company’s tankers have not been affected by the global IT glitch. Sheikh Khaled affirmed the company’s fleet is proceeding normally, adding the company has a series measures to be applied in cases of emergency.

Services provided by the Central Bank of Kuwait are uninterrupted, the bank affirmed on Friday. In a press release, the Central Bank revealed that the national banking sector was resilient in response despite the outage affecting Internet services on a global scale. The Central Bank instructed all entities under its supervision to implement its emergency plans to ensure the banking sector would continue to provide services and not affect the financial stability in Kuwait.

Kuwaiti Minister of Commerce and Industry Omar Al-Omar said Friday that CrowdStrike fully backs the Kuwaiti government’s response to the global IT outage. He said in a press statement that he had received a phone call from CrowdStrike’s Regional Director Ibrahim Badawi, who quoted the company’s CEO Kurtz as supporting Kuwait’s response to the incident.

He added that Badawi had briefed him on the latest developments of the glitch and confirmed the company’s backing to Kuwaiti government departments that use the company’s software out of its belief in necessary cooperation with its partners to overcome such challenges. The minister added that the company had apologized for the IT outage and affirmed that work was going on to fix any technical consequences.

Kuwait has established an operation room and hotline to monitor and counter cyberattacks or threats caused by a malfunction in the CrowdStrike update system, Omar said on Friday. The minister revealed the step to establish the emergency team came on directives from HH the Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Al-Abdullah Al-Sabah.

The team, comprising of several state entities including the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), is tasked to monitor the situation connected with the CrowdStrike issue and would take necessary measures to prevent attacks and safeguard digital infrastructure. The emergency team, said Omar, had listed companies and entities using CrowdStrike and Microsoft services, in addition to establishing direct communication with the two latter companies. He stressed that the situation in Kuwait was under control, noting that government-related applications and services were up and running.

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.

Australian, British and German authorities warned of an increase in scam and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details. Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, while some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.

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

Companies were left patching up their systems and trying to assess the damage, even as officials tried to tamp down panic by ruling out foul play. According to CrowdStrike’s Saturday blog, the issue was “not the result of or related to a cyberattack”. CrowdStrike boss Kurtz said in a statement his teams were “fully mobilized” to help affected customers and “a fix has been deployed”. – Agencies