New York City dealt with disruptions on multiple fronts Friday as a Microsoft outage grounded flights and knocked banks and businesses offline all around the world.

The technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services after an update from Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm, went wrong.

What You Need To Know

  • A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday

  • Mayor Eric Adams said the city's critical infrastructure was not affected by the outage

  • Some MTA customer information systems were temporarily offline, and all area airports were reporting delays and cancellations

During a press conference at City Hall Friday morning, Mayor Eric Adams said the city’s critical infrastructure remained operational, and confirmed the outages were not due to a cyberattack.

“Early this morning, [Crowdstrike] sent out a software update that inadvertently took systems offline,” Adams said. “This was not a cyberattack on our city’s infrastructure.”

The mayor emphasized that the city’s most critical services — its 911 call system, police radios, and water filtration systems — were not affected. 

Adams added that programs like Summer Rising would proceed as normal, saying that although parents might see disruptions on the bus tracking app, busing for Summer Rising would be fully operational and on schedule.

Meanwhile, some MTA customer information systems were temporarily offline Friday morning due to the worldwide technical outage. Train, bus and paratransit service remained unaffected, though.

Around 2:30 p.m., the MTA said it had been "working diligently to get customer information back up online and on screens," adding that real-time updates for the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad and numbered subway lines were up and running again. 

"Lettered lines and shuttles: work in progress!" the MTA said. "Train arrival times may be inaccurate on the A/B/C/D/E/F/G/J/M/N/Q/R/W/Z lines and Franklin Av and Rockaway Park shuttles while our systems recover from a global technical outage. Please listen for announcements."

At Adams' press conference, Dr. Mitchell Katz, the president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, said that all of the five boroughs' hospitals remained functional.

Memorial Sloan Kettering said it paused procedures that required anesthesia Friday morning “out of an abundance of caution,” but noted that surgeries “were taking place as planned” as of late Friday morning. 

“Any patient who was affected was contacted by their physician’s office,” the hospital said.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles couldn’t process transactions, the agency said some systems had been restored by Friday afternoon. Court proceedings were delayed Friday due to the outage, with resources being added to address arraignment backlogs in the city, according to the state’s Office of Court Administration.

Even some billboards in Times Square went dark during the outage. The Times Square Alliance said a handful of massive electronic screens switched off entirely.

The FAA, meanwhile, said that it was closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines.

As of around 8:00 p.m., data from FlightAware showed that LaGuardia Airport had 441 flight delays and 221 cancellations; John F. Kennedy International Airport had 439 delays and 109 cancellations; and Newark Liberty International Airport had 544 delays and 211 cancellations.

“Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved. For more information, monitor fly.faa.gov for updates,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

“There’s over 100,000 computers in the city of New York and there's thousands of servers. So, what we're doing right now is we're taking stock of every one that may have been impacted, and we're making a determination on which ones require that manual triage. As you can imagine, based on the manual state of the workaround, it's very time intensive,” Fraser said.

New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation said earlier Friday that the outage was only affecting Windows-based devices receiving automatic updates, and that it had been working for hours to halt any automatic updates and minimize potential service disruptions.

Around 5:45 a.m., George Kurtz, the CEO of Crowdstrike, confirmed the outages were not due to a security incident.

“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,”  Kurtz said in a statement.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., New York State Chief Cyber Officer Colin Ahern said in a statement that his team was working with "our agencies, local governments, and the third party service provider to resolve any issues on impacted systems."

Ahern said the state did not have a timeline for full restoration yet. The Adams administration says it is prepared for any future outages and has already been performing drills in case something like this occurs again.